Since You've Been Gone

All that's left is a band of gold-lamé-suited troubadours. They arrived shortly after you flounced off, with your gaudy reticule in one hand and a map of Tantarabim in the other. As Bob Dylan once sang, you left me standing in the doorway crying. But not for long. Soon the band arrived, quite unannounced, and made themselves at home. I fed them with what was left in the fridge - basil, glucose tablets and chopped-up suet - and went up to the attic to consult Dobson's little-known Tip Top Encyclopaedia Of Tip Top Pop Bands (out of print). Downstairs I could hear the band tuning up for what turned out to be a “jam” session, as the young people say. And what did I learn from Dobson? I discovered that my uninvited - but not unwelcome - guests had begun life as a skiffle combo called The Urbane Blodgett Seven. Riding the sixties wave, they tried out various styles until in 1969 they emerged, utterly transformed, as the pioneers of glob music. By now they had settled on the name of The Hinges And Nozzles, after being told that their other choices - among them Foghat, The Carpenters, Petula Clark, and Blodwyn Pig - had already been nabbed by other acts. The 1970s were kind to them, and they had a string of hit albums, including Baleful Porpoise, Jesuit Gewgaw Handler, and Irk The Shibboleth. The release of Brain Salad Surgery was postponed indefinitely after a rival album was released by a so-called “prog rock” group whose name Dobson could not recall, despite all the research materials listed in what Nestingbird has dubbed his “most exhaustive appendix”. Curiously, the latter phrase was the used as the title of a The Hinges And Nozzles compilation CD which was released only days before they showed up in my house. They are still here, by the way, and have told me in no uncertain terms - as they saying goes - that they will not leave until you come back to me, oh my darling, oh baby baby, please won't you come on home?

The Concrete Posts of Obergruwwel

He was beleaguered and curt, and had been ever since he was appointed to survey every single concrete post in the town of Obergruwwel. Witold Lutoslawski, the Polish composer who had worked with Panufnik as a cafe pianist, was on record as saying “Those concrete posts needed a surveyor, but why this hatless, lantern-jawed man of disrepute was chosen is nothing less than a civic disgrace”. Uncharitable, perhaps, for the surveyor had himself once been a cafe pianist, in The Dismal Bat, that haven for baffled people with persistent coughs. Ah, but that had been so long ago. Most of the customers were now in their graves; the cafe itself had been bulldozed to make way for a space-age bird sanctuary; and the pianist, poor curt Kurt, roamed the streets with pad and pencil, jotting down notes about the concrete posts. There were more than seven hundred such posts in Obergruwwel, and no one had thought to survey them until the Town Balaclava Guild sat in special session in the converted gym on that grim, teeming, winter Thursday, behind locked doors, its members clad in coats of many hues, just like Joseph, the papa of Jesus Christ. Later, when the bright moon shimmered among stars, the Guild Vizier made a proclamation from the Town Hall balcony. “We seek someone to survey the concrete posts,” he said, “Someone beleaguered and curt and hatless and lantern-jawed and disreputable.” Thus did Kurt meet his destiny in this world.

Tuesday Weld News

Hooting Yard's New Zealand correspondent Glyn Webster writes:

This seems so eerily Frank Key-ish I'm wondering if you are involved:

Bathtime in Clerkenwell : Go find a friend with a Windows PC to watch this: an animated video for 'The Real Tuesday Weld's Bathtime in Clerkenwell' in which an army of cuckoos attempt to wake and bathe a reluctant human. [ Windows Media ] http://www.tuesdayweld.com/video/bathtime.html

Sadly, I have to report that I am innocent of any involvement in this project. In fact, I have not yet, at time of writing, even viewed the link. But readers of A Catalogue of 53 Birds will see why Mr Webster diligently reported this finding. Meanwhile, here, as a print-and-cut-out-and-frame souvenir, is a signed picture of Ms Weld:

Ogre, Vapour

(Two extracts from The Immense Duckpond Pamphlet)

The next day all hell broke loose. Early in the morning, as Blodgett polished the outside spigots, an ogre or wild man hove into view atop the southern hills. Its progress towards the House was implacable. It stamped through the bracken, vaulted the ha-ha with a single bound, negotiated the massive basalt wall with surprising elegance, and sprang towards the terrified Blodgett, whirling its hirsute arms alarmingly and making disgusting guttural noises. It was matted with filth. Flies, gnats, and tiny things emitting poisonous goo crawled all over its flesh. It seemed to be decomposing. It drooled. It picked up Blodgett, sank its fangs into his skull, and hurled him aside. Pausing momentarily to spit out particles of Blodgett's head, it smashed its way through the wall of the House, oblivious to the fact that there was an ajar door three feet to its right. Once inside the House, its rage seemed to increase. It rushed wildly from room to room, obliterating the furniture, tearing up floorboards, destroying chandeliers, bashing holes into walls and ceilings, sucking the wallpaper off the walls. It chewed up banister rails and regurgitated them, disgorging them with such force that each rail acted as a lethal projectile. At least one of the urchins was impaled as a result. Five minutes after the ogre's arrival much of the lower part of the House lay in ruins. Small fires were starting, but they were doused by water spurting from uprooted taps. Euwige and Jubble were still sprawled in the Bittern Room when the ogre eventually came upon them. It let out an inhuman cry. It picked at its sores. It became becalmed. Fixing it with a bemused stare, Jubble rose to his feet. “You know, there might still be some grog left,” he said, “Would you care for a drop?” The ogre pounded its fists against its own head. Then it blinked, shuddered, twitched. Jubble pushed a tin mug of grog into its paw. It gulped the sweet muck down greedily, then threw the mug back at Jubble, missing his ear by a whisker, as they say. Something in its manner seemed to change. By now, blind Euwige too was on her feet. She sniffed at the violent pongs emanating from the ogre, then stepped towards it. “Thank heaven! You have come!” she said, “Jubble, meet my dear friend Detective Captain Unstrebnodtalb! He comes from a far country, and his brain is hot.”

Trellis was mere figment, vapour. He appeared to various people at various times as a sort of phantom. He was a tabula rasa, on to which those who met him inscribed their dreams, yearnings, hallucinations, longings. All, that is, except Blodgett, in whose presence Trellis took on a terrifying palpability. He would snivel, and Blodgett would have to mop up the snivellings with his shirt-cuff. He would mewl, and Blodgett would thump him on the head and bruise his grimy fist. After Detective Captain Unstrebnodtalb chewed up part of his head, Blodgett's relationship with Trellis became even closer. Trellis would tell Blodgett all about the weather in Finland, and the nature of ice, and give him planks, and show him the brains of starlings. He would invoke disastrous plutonian gods, and have them frolic, miniaturised, before Blodgett's eyes, occasionally tweaking his hair, or stamping upon his epaulettes. In return, Blodgett gave Trellis his own helpings of soup, winced at his frailness, concocted nursery rhymes and nautical yarns to keep him entertained, and piled raspberries on top of his ears. Together, they plotted dark and criminal deeds.

Climb Every Mountain

Ford every stream. Follow every rainbow, with a cutlery canteen, just as any good Victorian explorer would do. Those people knew precisely how to equip themselves for their often arduous journeys. Here, for example, is some advice from H H Johnston's Hints On Outfit of 1889: “I cannot too strongly recommend all travellers to supply themselves with quantities of light literature. By ‘light’ I do not mean frivolous in character, but devoid of great material weight, so that it can be easily packed and readily transported. There are a great many standard works now published in cheap editions in paper covers, and these, together with a supply of good novels, sensational tales, old magazines, and reviews, should be taken. It is astonishing with what pleasure [the traveller] will peruse the veriest rubbish in the wilderness, and really crave for anything that may serve to distract his mind at times from the savagery around him.” Utilitarian to a fault. Equally diverting is the strangely assorted cargo taken, a hundred years before, by Jean-Pierre Blanchard and his pals on the first Channel crossing by hot air balloon: a barometer and compass, thirty pounds of ballast, flags, anchors, cork jackets, a packet of pamphlets, a bottle of brandy, some biscuits and apples, two useless silk-covered aerial oars, an equally useless rudder, and a moulinet - a sort of hand-operated revolving fan with no apparent purpose. I would dearly love to know what those pamphlets were… exciting works by an 18th century ur-Dobson, most likely.

Ho! For Cormorants! (The Words)

Ho! for cormorants! Ho! for terns! These are the words the janitor learns. These are the words put into his gob by his docent, who's a slob. The docent packs his maw with words: corncrakes, shrikes, and other birds. The janitor dusts the docent's head, ridding the beetles and crumbs of bread and scraps of yarn and other orts, for grooming's not in the docent's thoughts. He only ever thinks of birds, teaching over a thousand words for creatures that have beaks and wings. He doesn't know about other things. He doesn't know the janitor's name. And nor do I. And that's a shame.

Ho! For Cormorants! (The Picture)

L'oreal : The Case Continues

Further to my legendary L'Oreal letter (see Career Change, 6th May), I have received this:

Frank, I found this mysterious message scrawled on an irregularly shaped, singularly corroded sheet of metal which fell into my garden last night. BD*

Dear Mr Key, It has been brought to my attention that you have shown interest in the possibility of becoming “the New Face” of L'Oreal. Being a very busy man - especially now that this so-called “Scandal of the Implausable Utensils” has surfaced - I have not yet had an opportunity to gaze upon your facial assets, if any, with my own eye. Yes my friend, you read that correctly; I said “eye”… for I possess only one. It was not always so. Please, please…spare me any demonstrations of pity or remorse! For it was of my own volition some decades ago that the organ, with its once inquisitive gaze, was spirited away to a particle physics research station of admittedly debatable repute where it is now lodged in a special calcium-lined retort, subjected to occasional light bombardments of energetic particles (the nature of which are distinctly open to criticism) whenever the thin, stooped, superannuated lab assistant can wrench himself away from his perpetual travail; the ultimate worth of which is certain to be slight. As interesting as I am sure you would find more biographical information about myself: enough! In order to be considered for employment as New Face, one must be handsome and clean-shaven; any attempt to disguise singular hairiness or structural abnormalities by the application of unguents or poultices, no matter how clever of a manner one may imagine them to have been applied, shall be cause for immediate dismissal. The last applicant who attempted to pull this little stunt I dismissed with a sudden volley of sharp, guttural barkings and unearthly bleatings, whilst contorting my typically mobile features into a stiff, sarcastic grimace. He, waving his hands in the air, muttering some airy-fairy quasi-occult philosophical gibberish, turned and left the nitre-encrusted chamber, NEVER TO BE SEEN AGAIN!

* NOTE : “BD” is Bob Drake. Go and visit him here.

Life and Loves of the Immersion Man

The man with the hammers, the man with the flags. He has a second pair of shoes. He bought them in Blister Lane, he had them repaired. His head is the same size as two of anyone else's head, or a few pounds of oranges, plums, or other fruit. It will take years. Once he had decided to paint his ship with stolen paint, he could not look back. The ship, when painted, would be burnt sienna in colour, stains apart. What a long ship it was, and is, and will be. It had sailed from shore to shore. He held sway at the helm, and on deck. He spat plum stones into his flask. Much later, he knew, they would be crushed, liquefied, in his blender, in his kitchen, in his other hut, the hut he had built at the docks, for those mornings when he did not set sail on his ship to reach some other shore, where he had other huts. In weather so suitable for breakfast on a lawn, eighteen bowls of Special K and a jellied, jellied eel, he would ram the oars home, force them into the muck, so they were perpendicular, not far away from the tallest of the six trees, which were poplars, or larches, or even yews. Oars fixed in place, he will paint them, the oars, with the delicate bristles of his Coddington brush. Its wooden handle has seen better days, particularly the days in Jutland, Scheveningen, Reykjavik, other landmarks of or near Scandinavia. Those were the days before he was pulled towards the seas. Who pulled him to the seas? Who made his flag? Who made his shoes? Ah, that I cannot say, not yet. The kettle maps were stacked in a rough wooden crate. The crate had been painted. Butter had been kept in this crate, butter used in the sandwiches he had eaten at half-time in all those polevaulting or archery competitions he had entered. They had struck a medal for him, he was so keen. He had lost the medal. It was zinc. It had fallen out of his pocket in March. Deep snow lay on the ground. He remembered the day well, because he had to, it was Potato Day! The village wrestler, the one with the goitre, had a big iron pot of gruel and slops, as he always did. No one knew how old he was, but his birthday parties were marked by rectitude and spasms. He was extremely tall, he had to stoop to enter his own house. It was a squalid house. It stank of vinegar. This wrestler was wont to sing remarkable songs as he sat on the jetty, dangling his feet in the brackish water. For many years he had tended his broken nose, applying a new set of bandages every day. He used bright red bandages, having smeared them first with ink or ointment. The bottles were identical, and kept on the same shelf. The shelf was made of plastic, but it sloped towards the left. Nothing heavier than two small bottles or some corks could be kept on it. He brushed his hair. The lake was hidden by trees, a mile away from Haemoglobin Towers. For a thousand years, the lake looked blue. One day, when he was famished, he swam there, he wore water-wings, rubber ones, and yellow. He had to inflate them with his perfumed breath. It took all morning. By noon he was exhausted. Later, stealthily, he crept by torchlight to the moorings. They had been varnished, so thoroughly that he slipped and fell. No bones were broken. But Pang Hill was no longer his home, nor could it ever be so, not while he wore such preposterous trousers. Eating jam by the spoonful, he watched the branch give way. It fell to the ground. He was wearing tiny sandals, three sizes too small. The stitching was coming loose on both of them, and not before time. The man with the clarinets had arrived. He sprang to his feet, on legs. They mucked about with each other's pencil sharpeners all day. An ailing vulture circled overhead. It had splendid musculature, or thought it did. Below, on the pebbles, they donned skindiving equipment. The pub was shut. The landlord had rouge ears underneath his hair. He carried a selection of bats, pails, needles and vicuna nets. These he patted with yearning. His one foot was shod in an enemy's shoe. A token of combat. It had a vulgar reek, but squashed ants and earwigs on the paving slabs with the best of them. This was called HACK-SLOT B. It meant so much, or it meant nothing, he was not sure. Long ago he had become entangled in the waterlogged corridors of the Big Damp Building, and now there was no escape. The magnificence of it was breathtaking. It had taken centuries to build, but only last year was the tin bath warehouse added on. He spat in it, and kept on spitting, he was unable to stop himself. Feathers sprouted, but did not grow. They were spindly and vicious. He could no longer remember how to speak Hungarian, if he ever knew. His boxer shorts were blue, from Budapest. There is a reason for everything, but not for food. Food must be speared with big tin forks. Or so he thought. He poked at the plankton with his fork. The plate had been smashed, it was in bits on the linoleum. He intended to take up athletics. They would wrap him in flowers and other greenery, and all because he had ruined his crayons when he was a tot. He was wicked, wicked, and he went on a cruise. The cruise took him north. Then it took him west. He was not sure which coinage to use. He had some change in his little pockets. It weighed so much, he had to trudge. After careful planning, he set fire to all the maps. He put the cartons to one side. They would be useful to him later on, if at all. But it was time to hold a grudge. He lighted upon a fishmonger, and rapped him on the nose with a fountain pen. Maroon ink spurted out on to the fishmonger's mouth and chin. He had lockjaw and some pianos. Where did he keep his pianos? They sent a detective to find out. One day, he would brandish despicable wooden things inside his tent. It was a famous tent, but age had frayed it. It was decorated with a boa constrictor motif, lacquered in mauve. He came upon it on a mountain top, he hurled it into a sand pit. His skull was perfectly formed and bright blue. There had been much talk of this in thousands of corridors and on horseback. All the fruit had been chewed. He checked his dictionary for errors. Under B he found plenty. He pasted them up, threw back his head, extricated some tacks from the hardboard, and shoved them into an envelope. This was stylish. He sat by the big clock. His sister arrived. She was an emigree. She buried three or four pelicans or yaks near a factory. That had to be the factory. This must be an ambulance! Its bleepers are off-pitch and ungodly. Bundled inside a blanket, she sported a mask, half of it carved out of mahogany and the rest out of something metallic. Delicate traceries of bip lay smeared on the gasworks, for this was Raymond's village. His dubbin was better than the rest. He had come this far, and had no sandwiches left. He was in agony. Darning the beekeeping outfit had been no laughing matter. The reek of sandalwood and lavender was in the air. He was penniless. Wearing an altimeter instead of a wristwatch, he careered along the towpath of the canal. The Immersion Man was on his way.

Croissants

Not just any old croissants, either:

This picture is taken from the Vintage Images section of a thoroughly recommended site called art-e-zine. Go there and browse for, oh, hours at all sorts of interesting and intriguing artwork. Here at Hooting Yard we have been inspired by the idea of making Matchbox Shrines. Currently in the works are shrines devoted to Blodwyn Pig, Ricardo Montalban, Emily Dickinson, Lamont Cranston, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Neil Sedaka, Dobson, and, of course, Yoko Ono. Pictures of these frighteningly exquisite works will be posted as soon as they're done. We are also toying with a special double-matchbox shrine devoted to Sting and Bono, which will be called All Hail The Shattered Dignity Of Messrs Sumner & Hewson. It will be splattered with some sort of goo, I expect.

Pin Bulletin Number One

This is the first instalment of the Hooting Yard Pin Bulletin, an important new series published as a service to readers who wish to be kept informed of all things pin-related. Here, for example, is a very useful tip from one Judy Amarose: When pushing pins into a foam board, try using a metal thimble. That will help save your fingers! You know, I think Judy is right. Dobson, of course, wrote about pins on a number of occasions, most famously in his pamphlet There's Hours Of Fun To Be Had With A Handful Of Pins, the only one of his works to be published under a pseudonym. The first edition of fifty-six copies, run off the press by Marigold Chew despite the fact that she had a collapsed lung at the time, purported to be by an author named “Blenkinsop”. When a second edition - of just four copies - was printed a decade later, Dobson reverted, wisely I think, to his real name. Jed Git, the wastrel Dobson scholar who perished in the 1958 Munich Air Disaster alongside the “Busby Babes”, hailed what he called “that pin pamphlet” as among the works that would prove to be timeless classics, celebrated a thousand years after their author's demise. He was wrong in this, as in so many things. Incidentally, forty-six years after his death, Jed Git's paramour still places a posy of primroses on his tomb on the sixth of February every year. The primroses are invariably withered.

Bashful Coctlosh Trauma Surgeon

Being the title of a novel by Maisie Pew, due to be published in September. It is a book of ten chapters, their titles being:

I. The Gelignite Zombie Person From Didcot

II. Pudding Time

III. Paste, Then Gruel

IV. Our Hero, Dr Slab, Goes Haywire

V. Being A Chapter In Which Lovecraftian Shudders Are Experienced By A Barnyard Person And A Ferocious Bat-Being

VI. Tord Grip

VII. The Other Gelignite Zombie Person From Didcot

VIII. That Sinuous L'Oreal Toss Of The Hair Performed By A Pirate Gang

IX. Shoes? Boots? String?

X. Mild Peril Fop Dilemma

Pang Hill News

Whatwhatwhat? Has Pang Hill Orphanage burned to the ground again? They must cease the use of blubber-candles forthwith. I know such lighting is cheap, but three conflagrations in as many months is evidence of sheer stupidity. At least the tinies were ushered to safety, scampering around the duckpond in their tunics while Mister Von Stroheim tried to gather them together for counting. Why on earth did he think that asking them to sing “Conquistador” by Procol Harum would becalm them? Alas, it had the usual effect, and instead of a placid duckpond-edge's-worth of orphans neatly lined up, he had to deal with tears and wailing and breast-beating and religious fervour and mischief and duck-taunting and drenchings and jiggery-pokery and panic and hopelessness and fisticuffs and spillages and mitten-loss. The reporter from the Weekly Shackle observed only one child filling a pail with duckpond water and carrying it over to the orphanage to combat the flames. Such a heroic tot! I shall make sure he is given a new pair of socks. It was not his fault that the bottom of the pail was half eaten away with rust, and that by the time he had crossed the prize-winning Condoleezza Rice Flower Garden and was within yards of the inferno, there were only a few meagre droplets of duckpond water left, and a fat lot of use they were, as “brilliant orange flames licked and curled around the charred cinders of what had once been Pang Hill's finest orphanage”. Surely the flames would have died down by the time there were cinders to be seen? But that bit is a quotation from the reporter, a man who knows his onions, or so I have been told. Apparently the dispatches he sent from the Bodger's Spinney Beehive Building Competition were so well-written that he was offered a job on the Daily Agony In The Garden, but he turned it down, unwilling to leave Pang Hill, whose snowdrops, cow parsley and phlox soothed his nerves, he said, and he was fearful that if he did not daily look upon them he would be bedizened and turn into a splinterbrain. As for the craven Mister Von Stroheim, I'm going to have his guts for garters when I lay my hands on him.

Source : The Bilgewater Elegies by Dobson (out of print)

Clairvoyant Pig

A Chewist text using a passage from Bulfinch's Mythology as its source. Infelicities of tense, from present to past and back again, can be laid squarely at Bulfinch's door. For a definition of Chewism, see 2nd March.

The HMS Clairvoyant Pig is setting out on a dangerous mission, and its captain is bilious. Meanwhile they glide out of the harbour, and the breeze plays among the ropes. The captain sits in his cabin, puffing aimlessly into his tuba, for he is not a musical man. The seamen draw in their oars, and hoist their sails. The ferocious geese that the purser's nephew insisted on bringing with him have been penned in an impromptu pen for ferocious geese. When half or less of their course was passed, as night drew on, the sea began to whiten with swelling waves, and the east wind to blow a gale. The captain blew a prolonged discordant note into his tuba as a signal for the ship's master, to whom he left the running of the ship. The master gave the word to take in sail, but the storm forbade obedience, for such is the roar of the winds and waves his orders are unheard. One of the geese has managed to peck its way out of the pen. The men, of their own accord, busy themselves to secure the oars, to strengthen the ship, to reef the sail. None of them has a clue about the true nature of the mission, which is to plop their cargo into holes dug on the beach of the Island of Doctor Flap. While they thus do what to each one seems best, the storm increases. In his cabin, the captain looks bewildered and sad. The shouting of the men, the rattling of the shrouds, and the dashing of the waves, mingle with the roar of the thunder. Both geese and men shudder uncontrollably. The swelling sea seems lifted up to the heavens, to scatter its foam among the clouds; then sinking away to the bottom assumes the colour of the shoal - a Stygian blackness. So it was, on that evil Thursday two centuries ago…

Pencil of the Month

Dr Ruth Pastry has written in to bemoan the passing of our popular “Decoy Duck of the Week” feature. I can understand, she writes, That you may have become bored of decoy ducks, but surely this is no excuse to deprive your readers of the pleasures of a regular pictorial series? I used to look forward with eagerness to the weekly duck, print it out on a colour laser printer, and paste it into an album that I bought especially. Now I'm left with lots and lots of empty pages. Please either reinstitute the decoy duck series, or start a new one. How about “Plasticine Cow of the Week?” I am pleased to inform Dr Pastry that the Hooting Yard staff member with responsibility for plasticine farmyard animals is “on the case”, as it were. Meanwhile, here is the first Pencil of the Month.

Regarding Today's Quotation

Sometimes you have to put Google through its paces. After selecting today's quotation (originally published in 1893, by the way) I decided to look up “bad drawing of a horse”. This yielded two - identical - results, the transcript of a 1982 interview with Andy Partridge, in which he referred to certain record company executives' reactions to the image used for the cover of XTC's English Settlement album:

Mildly disappointed at the paucity of results, I tried again with “bad drawing”+“horse” as my search parameters. This time I got 197 results. A disturbing amount led me to sci-fi and fantasy art fandom sites. Don't even go there. When I had recovered from the resultant headache, and pondered the number of centaurs and unicorns I had stumbled upon, I ploughed on. All I wanted was something to illustrate the quotation, and eventually I found it. Alright, I know it's a child's drawing rather than a bad drawing per se, but, you know, here at Hooting Yard we go to great lengths to entertain and instruct our readers, and we still miss the guiding hand of Mrs Gubbins, whose latest exploits were recorded the day before yesterday.

THIS IS A HORSE

A Potted Biography of Sigismundo Ock, the Balaclava-clad Poetaster Whose Plinth Is Splattered With Muck

Ock was a grim and desperate fellow. His hair was lank and his teeth were yellow. He had neither knife nor spoon nor fork. He had been pecked at by an auk. There were all sorts of things the matter with him, so he made an appointment with Doctor Jim. But Jim had embezzled his fees and fled, so Ock went home and boiled his head - yes, he boiled his own head, a rum thing to do. Now there's a story on which to chew.

Was Dobson Stalin?

This is the intriguing thesis propounded by Aloysius Nestingbird in his new book, entitled Was Dobson Stalin? : Laying Bare The Greatest Secret Of Twentieth Century Communist Politics Once And For All, With Eight Diagrams, Six Colour Plates, A Big Map & Far Too Many Footnotes (Thedoobiebrothers Books, £16.99). Here is a short extract, including one of those infernal footnotes - which itself has a footnote:

Let us consider the fact that Stalin's childhood nickname was “Soso”. Later he became “Koba”, and of course “Stalin” itself is a nickname, the “Man of Steel”. There are profound implications here. Was Dobson, as a child, not known as “Doso”? In his twenties, was it not common for such friends as he had to call him “Doba”? Did he not later become known as the “Man of Bandages?” *

*NOTE : Just before this book went to press, the author received decisive information. Apparently, not one of these nicknames was ever applied to Dobson. Even when he was a babe in swaddling clothes, his parents addressed him as “Dobson”, as did everyone else he ever met throughout his life. There are those who will carp and say my theory is thus invalidated. A pox upon them! Just take a look at these photographs: one shows a gigantic poster of Stalin at the height of his personality cult; the other shows a huge billboard with what is incontrovertibly the image of Dobson.*

* For copyright reasons I am unable to reproduce the extremely similar Dobson photograph.

Andrewmotionopoly

The exciting wordgame Andrewmotionopoly is closely allied to the equally thrilling pastime Johnfowlesopoly (see 23rd March and 1st April). As in the latter, the idea is to compose a text containing all the adjectives in a prescribed list - in this case, those in the above Blathwayt quotation. However, this time, instead of devising a bedtime story suitable for tiny tots, the challenge is to compose a poem worthy of our titanically talented Poet Laureate. To assist readers wishing to contribute verses or doggerel to a forthcoming Andrewmotionopoly Anthology, here are those adjectives in alphabetical order: airy, busy, clean-shaven, clever, energetic, handsome, inquisitive, interesting, light, little, mobile, perpetual, sarcastic, sharp, slight, special, thin. Seventeen adjectives in two sentences is quite a feat. Your poem, however, can be as long as you like, so long as you include all those adjectives, which must appear once and once only. Extra admiration will be showered upon entries which include the (non-compulsory) phrase “waving in the air”. So set to work, readers!

Bird News

Many readers, not least the ornithologists among you, will know that birds are commonly covered in feathers. A bird’s feathers are replaced periodically during its life through molt. For those of you who do not know what a bird is, let me tell you: it is a bipedal, warm-blooded, egg-laying vertebrate characterized primarily by feathers, forelimbs modified as wings, and hollow bones. Wings, by the way, are surfaces used to produce an aerodynamic force normal to the direction of motion by travelling in air or another gaseous medium, gas being one of the phases of matter. An ideal gas, or perfect gas, is a hypothetical gas which obeys gas laws exactly. Below is a picture of a man who devoted his life to obeying the Laws of Gas. You will note that he has a feather in his cap. In such ways are all things in this world interlinked.

That Mrs Gubbins Woman

A shrivelled and panting urchin with a corkscrew haircut turned up at Haemoglobin Towers this morning with the latest news of Mrs Gubbins, who we last heard from on 28th April. Apparently, a second raid on her hideout by the Blister Lane Constabulary Dangerous Python Squad was partly successful. Most of the octogenarian fugitive's “minders” perished after being attacked by the snakes and their robot-controlled metal counterparts. Astonishingly, Mrs Gubbins herself made a daring getaway, using her crutches in an inventive way which the urchin was unable to divulge, either through ignorance or inarticulacy. He was able to inform us, however, that our pal has taken refuge in the Tent of the Tundists, who have vowed to protect her if she embraces Tundism. We have sent a greetings card to her. It shows a picture of a decidedly inelegant giraffe standing next to some beetles. Mrs Gubbins is fond of beetles.

Career Change

It grieves me to announce that the Hooting Yard website may have to close. If my latest scheme succeeds, I very much doubt that I will have any spare time. I know that all my readers will be avid for details of my plan, so here is the text of a letter I sent out today:

Dear L'Oreal, I would like to apply to become the new “Face of L'Oreal”, as I think we both know that the model and actress Andie McDowell has been hanging on to the role for too long. You probably think that I am unsuitable, as I am a man who does not actually use your products, and my hair is fairly short, at least in comparison to Andie's, so I won't be able to do that hair-tossing thing very effectively. I can toss my head, though.

Where I think I could really make a difference is in my ability to speak the part of the script that includes the scientific information. I enclose a tape recording of one of my practice-runs, and I think you will be impressed at the bit where I say: “Now with reduced pH values and clinically-tested Norwegian molecule-balancing agents”. As for the punchline - “Because I'm worth it” — I think there is an opportunity here to diversify and create some new catchphrases which will soon be on the lips of millions of people worldwide. As I have indicated, when I toss my head my hair doesn't do that sinuous, flowing, Andie thing, so it looks as if I've got some kind of nervous tic. Well, let's use that! Imagine that at the end of the advert, I toss my head and say “L'Oreal - because I've got ergot poisoning” or “L'Oreal - because I've got Tourette's Syndrome”. It's a winner.

I look forward to receipt of my contract in the post.

Yours, because I'm worth it, Frank Key

The Besmirched and Bonkers Topiary Man : His Hoodoo and Collapse

I will tell you how it happened, in November 1919, in Holland.

His besmirchment. His besmirchment was physical rather than moral, but no less catastrophic for that. He was walking beside a pond, and an evil-eyed tiny one careered towards him on a tricycle. In stepping aside to avoid a collision, he lost his footing and fell into the pond, and the pond was stagnant and brackish and rife with all that slimy green wispy stuff found in stagnant brackish ponds, so when he clambered out on to the path, sopping wet and lugubrious, his clothing was besmirched. He was poor, and had but that one suit of clothes, and so he remained besmirched.

His being bonkers. His parents ran a private asylum, and he grew up in its grounds. His earliest pals were the madcaps, loons and holy innocents who were incarcerated there. Never diagnosed as lunatic himself, he nonetheless exhibited eccentricities and harboured strange casts of thought which led the wider world to view him as a zany, even forty years after his parents perished in the flames which laid waste their asylum.

His topiary. How I wish I could write: “he was the finest topiarist the Netherlands ever produced”, but I cannot, for he was not. In truth, his topiary was inept. More often than not, those few who came to view his work were unable to identify what he had meant to depict. By rifling through newspaper accounts, we know, for example, that when he unveiled his gigantic Belgian hedge entitled Judith Slaying Holofernes, the citizens of Antwerp thought they were looking at a representation of a giant pig. Similarly, the Foliage Portrait of Pope Pius IX was mistaken for a fruitbat.

The hoodoo. This besmirched and bonkers man had the signal misfortune to be placed under a hoodoo by forces both malevolent and uncanny. All attempts to extricate himself from the hoodoo only made it more malign. The actual details are too sickening to recount. But let it be said that, at the last, angels played their pipes and bright wings bore his soul to heaven.

His collapse. It was Thursday. He sat under the shade of a big tree with many branches and countless leaves. He was chewing a brazil nut and reading a paperback copy of A Dictionary of Glues. A chaffinch sang and the sky was blue. His matted hair had been cut the day before, and his boots were freshly repaired. The raucous hobbledehoys whose tauntings ruined his morning had gone off to cause mayhem on the railway tracks. He had been able to afford a pair of swimming trunks, and planned a dip in a nearby canal. He swallowed what was left of the nut, put the book in his satchel, stood up, and began to walk towards the Iron Palace. Halfway across the shimmering lawn, he collapsed. It was the very end of him.

On the Air

Today sees the fourth programme in the weekly series Hooting Yard On The Air, broadcast on ResonanceFM (see top of page for details). I thought readers might enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at how the show is made.

Four or five hours before transmission time, the recording studio is thoroughly disinfected by a crack squad of specialist cleaning workers dressed in what look like astronauts' outfits. They are armed with a panoply of highly intriguing tools, instruments and tweezers, many of which have no apparent purpose. The ResonanceFM HQ is, as some readers know, located in a subterranean basement far, far below the London streets, and is only accessible via an underground pneumatic-capsule railway system last used in the 1880s but which has been preserved, like a fly in amber, by a group of enthusiasts all of whom by weird coincidence are named Tim, as their fathers were before them.

When disinfection is complete, other preparations are made. Antique bakelite canisters are distributed to dozens of eager factotums (or should that be factota?). Grease-pans, handled by imperious and jewel-dappled kitchen staff, are lowered into magnificent neoclassical oven-like pods of questionable - though remarkable - significance. Any stray toads are ushered violently from workspaces. A xylophone, abandoned after an earlier programme, is yanked off its hinges and hurled zestfully into a yellow xylophone waste vat. Urgent telecommunications signals are read and reread quickly, then plastered on to oblong cards which are nailed to murals in one of the many lobbies. Knots are tied in jumpers. Incredibly huge golden flaps have to be emblazoned with diamond patterns. The dank cellar of the building is then aired.

Listeners are often surprised to learn that Frank Key does not actually appear on the show himself. His place is taken by an actor named Ludovico Boole. Boole's ability to mimic the vocal inflections of anyone he chooses is matchless, and he has had a long and successful career doing so. Other impersonations he has essayed include Sir Isaiah Berlin, Tuesday Weld, both Richard and Karen Carpenter, and President Nixon's henchman H R Haldeman, of Watergate fame.

An hour before Hooting Yard On The Air is broadcast, Boole is collected from the roof of his seaside compound by a helicopter disguised as an air ambulance, and flown to one of the termini of the pneumatic railway on the outskirts of London. For security purposes, a different terminus is chosen each week, the decision being made by the chopper pilot during the flight.

Safely ensconced in the ResonanceFM HQ, Boole is handed the week's script together with the meal he insists on as part of his contract: four bloaters, a bowl of boiling hot custard, breadcrumb flan, and a jug of thoroughly-diluted potato extract. Wiping his mouth on a monogrammed napkin, Boole then enters the studio and begins to read…

Once Upon a Time

You dressed so fine. You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you? Well no, you didn't. You should have. Mister Compton at the Tweezer Factory told you to, but you ignored him. You did worse than ignore him. You tipped his hat off his head and trod on it until it was crushed. And what did you do then? You kicked the crushed hat into the gutter, with a sneer on your lips. And, oh! how that sneer disfigured your face. It was an ugly sneer, and made of you an ugly person, something nobody had recognised until then. You, who had won the hearts of a multitude through your good works in the field of bird welfare, you who had cradled crows in your arms, who had nursed an injured starling through three long days and nights, who had fed droplets of rainwater to a hummingbird, who so delicately brushed the feathers of an ostrich which had food poisoning, you whose eyes lit up with glee when a flock of little bitterns soared across the blue, blue sky, you - the so-called “Cassowary Man”… for you to betray the faith so many had in you, to reveal your sinful heart by kicking Mister Compton's crushed hat into the gutter, and not just any gutter, but a foul, filthy, stinking gutter, greasy with slime… for you to do that shocked us all. Now you languish in a prison cell, accused of feckless acts and nincompoopery, and Mister Compton lies buried in a distant windswept graveyard. Oh Cassowary Man, Cassowary Man… we can never forgive you.