July 23rd, 2008
Random Twaddle.
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Beppo was banished to a pompous land where he knew nobody. At the docks, under Kleig lights, for they disembarked from the boat in the middle of the night, his chains were taken off by the skipper himself. Mussing Beppo’s filthy hair, the skipper reminded him that he was now in a land of much pomposity, and forbidden to leave it for forty years.
Beppo saw little pomp at the docks. He saw crates and stevedores and container ships and much else one might expect to see at docks in any land. Never having hung around any docks before now, Beppo was smitten by the novelty of the sights and sounds and smells, and he stayed put. He sat for hours on a bench on the docks watching ships and sailors and crates. He begged for bloaters from the crews of smacks which brought their catch to the docks. He found shelter under a neglected tarpaulin and rubbed unguent into those parts of his flesh where the chains had chafed it. He gawped at floozies roaming the docks in their satins and silks. A floozie with a cloche hat befriended him and talked of the pomposity of the land beyond the docks.
After one hundred days at the docks, Beppo nerved himself to leave. His cloche hatted friend convinced him to go to the capital city, where majestic buildings scraped the sky and the blades of helicopters whirred and the paving slabs along the boulevards were free of grime and grease. But she forgot to tell him about the pompous sentries at the city gates whose lips curled in sneers at Beppo’s approach.
Beppo explained that he had been banished from his own land and that he had come to the capital city to get work piloting a helicopter. His plan, which he did not divulge to the sentries, was to become fat and to grow a moustache and to pilot a helicopter back to his own land where he hoped his new fat moustachioed appearance would deceive his banishers.
The sentries chuckled pompously and marched Beppo off to an area of disused railway infrastructure, where they tied him to the rails. They got this idea from watching a number of silent film serials starring Pearl White (1889-1938), including The Perils Of Pauline, The Exploits Of Elaine, The Iron Claw, The Fatal Ring, The House Of Hate, and Plunder. The sentries overlooked the fact that, the railway being disused, no locomotive would come hurtling towards trapped Beppo as he struggled with the cords that bound him.
The sentries’ knot-tying skills were lamentable, and Beppo managed to free himself within minutes. Then he wandered off along the disused railway track, skirting the capital city. He hoped to find a spot where he might breach the massive granite wall, a spot without sentries and where a certain amount of crumblement had occurred.
Alas! When Beppo found such a spot he discovered that it was used as a conduit by feral, zombie-like ruffians. These creatures had once been full citizens of the capital city but had been shunned due to their lack of pomposity. They now lived in a twilight world, staging raids into the city through the crumblement zone and setting upon passing wayfarers outwith the wall, such as Beppo. They sheared the hair off his head and sprinkled the cuttings on to the soup in their billycans. They made him wear a foolish hat. They poked him with pointed sticks and drooled upon him. His humiliations ceased at nightfall when searchlights from a patrolling helicopter picked out the ruffians and made them flee. The helicopter landed in an adjoining field and Beppo was bundled aboard.
The flight to the helipad in the pompous capital city was a short one, but halfway there the helicopter was engulfed in thick, thick fog, fog so thick that visibility was zero. On
He has a headstone in the graveyard of the capital city of that pompous land. It is marked with an X, and the earth beneath it holds no bones.
July 22nd, 2008
Prose.
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Number one in a series of paintings showing birds on windowsills. This is Ein Besuch by Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885).
July 22nd, 2008
Random Twaddle.
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James Joyce was terrified of thunder and lightning, and used to cower beneath a table during electrical storms.
Dr Franklin first showed that lightning is the same as the electricity made by the electrical machine. As the electricity of the electrical machine is got by rubbing glass, so much of the electricity of the air is caused by the rubbing of moist air against dry air. A great deal is made by the turning into vapour or mist of the salt water of the ocean by the sun’s heat or by the blowing of the wind. More water is turned into vapour during the heat of summer and autumn than in winter, and this is why there is more lightning in warm than in cold weather.
There is always a good deal of electricity in the air, and in clear weather it is generally positive electricity. But during fogs, rains, or snows it is usually negative electricity, though it changes often. It sometimes happens that two clouds, one charged with positive electricity and the other with negative electricity, come near each other, and then the two kinds of electricity rush together, when a flash of lightning is seen and thunder is heard.
The lightning is the same thing as a spark from an electrical machine, the only difference being that a flash of lightning is sometimes several miles long and the spark only a few inches. The little spark gives out only a snapping sound, but if we were able to make a spark as large as a flash of lightning it would cause as much noise as thunder.
When a cloud filled with one kind of electricity comes near the earth while the earth is filled with electricity of the opposite kind, the cloud may discharge its electricity to the earth. If any tall object, such as a tree, a steeple, or a house, happens to be near where the cloud discharges, the electricity will often pass down it to the earth. In this way houses are sometimes injured and set on fire, and great trees are blasted into tiny pieces. Sometimes, too, human beings and beasts of the field are struck and killed. It is not safe, therefore, to stand under a tree or close to a high house during a thunderstorm. James Joyce was safe enough cowering beneath his table.
We see lightning in several different forms. Sometimes its flash is straight, sometimes it is forked or zig-zag, sometimes it is round like a ball, and sometimes it spreads over the clouds like a sheet of fire. When a thunder-cloud is near the earth the flash comes straight down to the earth, because there is but little air for it to pass through, but when the cloud is at a considerable distance from the earth, the air in the path of the lightning is made denser or thicker by being pushed together, and as lightning can pass quicker through thin than through thick air, it flies from side to side so as to pass where the air is thinnest. Thus its path is zig-zag or forked. When there is a very great charge of electricity in a cloud it sometimes forces its way through the air in the shape of a ball. What is called sheet lightning is either the reflection or shine on clouds of a stroke of zig-zag lightning which is too far off to be seen, or light discharges of electricity from clouds which have not enough to cause zig-zag lightning.
When lightning passes through air it leaves behind it a vacuum – that is, an empty place – and the air rushing in to fill it makes the noise which is called thunder (ukkonen in Finnish). We do not usually hear this until some time after the flash of lightning, because light travels more than a million times faster than sound. Both light and sound travel incredibly faster than a human being, James Joyce, say, taking a stroll in the streets of
Lightning, in its way to the earth, will always follow the best conductor, and when it strikes a building or a tree it will leap from side to side to find it. It likes pointy things rather than blunt or rounded things, and this is why lightning rods have sharp points. Buildings properly fitted with lightning rods are safe from being struck by lightning, because the rods lead off the electricity into the earth. When a cloud filled with electricity comes over the rods, the electricity will flow silently down them until the cloud is discharged, and we see no flash and hear no thunder. We can feel sure the building will not be struck. The tops of lightning rods are usually made of silver or are gilded, so that they may not rust and thus become worthless. The lower end of the rod must be carried down into damp earth. If the earth is dry it is better to carry the end of the rod into a well, because dry earth is not so good a conductor as moist earth, and the lightning might leap from the rod at the lower end and go into the cellar of the building. High chimneys should have lightning rods on them, because the soot in them is a good conductor, as is also the vapour which rises from them when fires are burning.
The word lightning in Finnish is salama. A flash of lightning is salaman leimahdus.
July 22nd, 2008
Prose.
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For a long time, I used to go to bed early. I was exhausted from long days working as a janitor in an evaporated milk factory. There are those who think that being a janitor is an easy life, little more than a matter of rattling a set of keys, sloshing a mop along a corridor floor, and glaring reproachfully at all who pass by. There may be janitors of that kidney, but I was not that kind of janitor, and never had been, neither in this nor in any of my earlier janitorships. It is a curious fact that the buildings in which I have been a janitor have all housed milk-related activities. Before being appointed to my post in the evaporated milk factory, I worked at a condensed milk canning plant, a milk of magnesia research laboratory, and a milk slops sloppage tank.
When I was younger I lacked application and was frequently reprimanded, on a carpet, as is usually the case, by my superiors. The overseer of the sloppage tank was particularly rancorous, as I recall. But by the time I fetched up at the evaporated milk factory, I took my duties seriously, excessively so, and that was why I was exhausted at the end of the day. To be precise, I was exhausted before the end of the day, hence my going to bed early.
There is a pamphlet by Dobson, entitled Tips For Janitors (out of print), which helped to mend my ways. One boiling hot summer Sunday, at a loose end, I went to visit a dying janitor in a Mercy Home. His brow was beetle and his jaw was lantern, and he was slowly perishing from a malady which had set in after an attack of the bindings and which he could not shake off due to his advanced age. It was not entirely clear just how old he was, for his birth certificate had been destroyed by worms. He certainly looked unbelievably ancient when I went to see him on that boiling day. Propped up in a sort of collapsible medical chair, surrounded by dripping foliage, like General Sternwood in The Big Sleep, he had made a vain attempt to mask his decrepitude by dyeing his hair black with boot polish and by sporting the type of tee shirt worn by young Japanese trendies. Neither ploy fooled me. I knew I was looking at a janitor who had begun his career in the age of gas mantles and steam.
My visit was prompted by a plea from the Charitable Board For Janitors Close To Death, seeking volunteers to pay social calls on janitors close to death to brighten their last days. I thought myself too lugubrious to be suitable for such a good deed, but the Board’s director, an ex-flapper by the name of Mimsy Henbane, said that this particular dying janitor rejoiced in the lugubrious and funereal and bleak and that my presence would lift his spirits.
Like the Italian castrato opera singer Luigi Marchesi (1754-1829), who, irrespective of the part he was playing, insisted on making his stage entrances on horseback, wearing a helmet with white feathers several feet long, I liked to cut something of a dash when entering a Mercy Home. On this particular Sunday I was ensmothered in fine kingly raiment, complete with the pelt of a wolverine (Gulo gulo, the largest land-dwelling member of the weasel family), a burnished golden helmet Marchesi would have died for, and a bauble or two. It was stiflingly hot, of course, but my blood is ice cold, and I had achieved a temperate equilibrium as I strode majestically into the greenhouse wherein the dying janitor awaited me. I am unable to tell you his name, not because I do not know it, but because I found it completely unpronounceable. He was of Tantarabim parentage, and bore one of those impossible, and I must say foolish, names they are so fond of in that land. He was also wearing a pair of dentures which had been designed for a mouth much larger than his, so it was not only his name I failed to catch. I had brought with me, as a gift, a bag of Extra Crunchy Hard Crunchable Crackers, and it looked to me as if those gigantic teeth would be more than a match for their crunchiness. Indeed they were. For a few minutes, as the dying janitor shovelled the crackers gratefully into his gob, it was like being in a hot damp greenhouse with a snapping turtle. He crunched his way through the whole bagful so rapidly that I wondered if he was ever fed. I had not seen any staff in the Mercy Home, not even a janitor. In fact, I had not seen any other patients. There were some pigs in a sty between the greenhouse and the main building, but otherwise the place seemed deserted.
One of the things I have always liked about people from Tantarabim is that they are so easy to rub along with. After he had scoffed his crackers, the dying janitor sat there smiling weakly but, I supposed, contentedly, while I loomed above him lugubrious and funereal and bleak, just as Mimsy Henbane had suggested. I decided to stay until his smile faded, and propped myself against a pane of glass, having first twisted the dying janitor’s neck round slightly so I was still within his sight. It felt good to be doing something selfless for one who had trodden the path of janitordom before me. I pondered if this was what being a boy scout was all about. My only connection with the toggled tribe had been a single incident, in the year of the Tet Offensive, when I failed to stop a snackbar hooligan pushing a puny boy scout into a lake. I would have intervened, but I was preoccupied at the time with recalibrating a mechanism, one of my leisure pursuits in the days when I was an indolent janitor rather than the indefatigable one I became at the evaporated milk factory, when I no longer had time nor energy for leisure pursuits of any kind. Despite his puniness, the boy scout had passable swimming skills, and he managed to avoid drowning in the lake, a lake in which many had met a watery death. I knew this because their names were inscribed on a plaque affixed to a post at the edge of the lake, and I had bashed the post into the mud myself, with a hammer, one day many years before when I had nothing else to do. I used to roam the lakes and ponds and thereabouts with my hammer, looking for posts to bash into the muck. If I could not find any posts I became disconsolate and squatted on the nearest available tussock, sobbing, until it was time to wend my way home.
I had plenty of time to dwell upon my past as I leaned against the pane of glass in the hot greenhouse, for the dying janitor’s smile never wavered. It seemed that he was so pleased with the crackers and with my lugubrious presence that he had entered a state of transcendent bliss. I was determined, however, to keep to my plan of staying with him until he was no longer smiling. I knew Mimsy Henbane would approve, and in a sense it was also a way of assuaging the guilt I still felt about failing to prevent the snackbar hooligan shoving that puny boy scout into the lake. That had happened many years before, as I have indicated, but as time passed my conscience gnawed at me with ever increasing ferocity. In those days, far from going to bed early, often I never went to bed at all, instead marching up and down countryside lanes all night, incapable of sleep. I was keeping the same hours as owls, and if nothing else that fraught insomniac period helped me to extend my ornithological education. If I was a pamphleteer like Dobson, rather than a janitor, I am sure I could churn out innumerable essays on owls and other nocturnal birds. As it is, I make do by buttonholing the occasional evaporated milk factory employee and sharing my bird-learning with them, whether they like it or not. It was a pity that the dying janitor was from Tantarabim, and wearing dentures far too big for his mouth, and thus would have been unintelligible to me were he to be prodded into speech, for there was something in his demeanour which told me that he, like me, was an erudite janitor. I could not guess what his area of expertise was, of course, so I made a mental note to ask Mimsy Henbane when next I called into the Charitable Board For Janitors Close To Death HQ.
Mimsy’s journey from flapper to charitable board director was an extraordinary one. Her story has inspired poets, novelists, composers, film makers, and creative titans in just about any field you can think of, not least the designers of tee shirts worn by young Japanese trendies. Dennis Beerpint wrote a series of Cantos about her. Anthony Burgess struggled for years with a novel based on her life, but was forced to abandon it when he concluded that such a work was beyond his imaginative powers. An opera bouffe by Boof was inspired by her. Dan Brown is apparently working on a potboiler called The Mimsy Henbane Code. Before his untimely death, Rainer Werner Fassbinder planned a film about her set in a tough foreign dockyard full of tough homosexual sailors. The list goes on. Yet intriguingly, not one of the works based on her life ever addressed the root of her devotion to janitors close to death. There is always plenty about her flapperhood, and about the Antarctic expedition, the beekeeping, the shipwreck, the surgical interventions, the gladsome spring and the buffets of autumn, the postage stamp mystery, the years of crime, the gutta percha interlude, the bittersweet romances, the collapsed lung, the other collapsed lung, the delicate little fists beating hopelessly against wooden panels in the hut in the forest, the evil chickens, the gaudy boudoir, the Karen Carpenter incident, the vandalism, the scuba diving, the pitfalls, the obelisk, the gravel pathways, the euphonium band, the pint of milk, and the gruesome business in the tough foreign dockyard full of tough homosexual sailors. Yet of janitors, dying or otherwise, not one word. I know, because I’ve checked. Before I started working myself to exhaustion in the evaporated milk factory, I was able to spend some of my leisure time making a thorough study of all the Mimsy Henbane-related books and films and plays and opera bouffes and trendy Japanese tee shirts etcetera. From Beerpint to Burgess, from Boof to Brown, no creative titan deems janitors worthy of a mention. I try not to take this personally, and deny that I have poked pins into miniature wax effigies of any of those named, or of any others, such as Harrison Birtwistle and Salman Rushdie and the paperbackist Pebblehead, during spooky
I think what wiped the smile off his face at last was that he felt pangs of hunger for more crackers. He mumbled something at me in that weird, impossible Tantarabim accent, and pointed a bony finger at the empty cracker bag he had dropped on the floor. I told him that I would go to Old Ma Purgative’s clifftop superstore, a lengthy hike away, to get another bagful. I wondered if he would still be alive when I returned. As I turned to sweep out of the greenhouse as dramatically as I had entered, in my kingly raiment, he rummaged in a little wooden cupboard next to his chair, took out the Dobson pamphlet Tips For Janitors, and pressed it into my greedily outstretched hands.
Over the next few days, as I made my slow lugubrious funereal bleak way towards the coast and the clifftop, I stopped from time to time to sprawl on bright summertime lawns and I read the out of print pamphlet from cover to cover. When I had finished it, I started again from the beginning. I was thunderstruck. In spite of my various milk-related janitorial posts, I felt I was reading about an entirely new and different calling, one of which I was profoundly ignorant. Between them, the dying janitor and Mimsy Henbane and Dobson changed my life.
Eager as I was to become a reborn janitor at the earliest opportunity, I was mindful of my promise to the dying janitor in the greenhouse next to the pig sty. I had made him so happy with that bag of Extra Crunchy Hard Crunchable Crackers, and had vowed to fetch him another bag. Torn between duty and desire, I spent a miserable morning sobbing on a tussock. Then Fortune smiled upon me, just as the dying janitor had done, by sending into my path a boy scout. As puny as the one who, years before, I had seen pushed into a lake by a snackbar hooligan, the child appeared at the side of my tussock and inquired if I had a job for him to do in exchange for a shilling. I took his coinage and sent him off towards Old Ma Purgative’s clifftop superstore, having armed him with full instructions and a map, and his shilling back to pay for the crackers. Then I turned my face towards
July 20th, 2008
Prose, Dobson, Shaka Pebblehead and Pointy Town.
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Here are some photographs. The brief accompanying text is splendid.
July 19th, 2008
Random Twaddle.
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If, like me, you are unreasonably obsessed with the weird goings-on in the Anglican church, you might have discovered the blog being tapped out by Bishop Gene Robinson*. I am certainly pleased that I stumbled upon it, for I have learned about Saint Rumwold.
Saint Rumwold was born at King’s Sutton in AD 662, the son of Saint Cyneburga and King Alchfrid. His first words, on the day he was born, were “I am a Christian”. He then asked to be baptised, and to receive Holy Communion. The next day he preached a sermon, quoting freely from Scripture. On the third day he addressed another sermon, to his parents, and then he keeled over and died. A pious infant indeed.
Possibly even more pious than Edward Gorey’s Henry Clump…
*NOTE : Pansy Cradledew has asked me to point out that Bishop Gene Robinson, a gay bishop, should not be confused with Gay Bishop, the TV newsreader who sometimes presents news items about gay bishops.
July 19th, 2008
Things I Have Learned.
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Hooting Yard has a number of bee monitors who keep us up to speed with various bee doings around the globe. Many thanks, then, to Tristan Shuddery (Bee Monitor No. 56A) for alerting us to this article which tells us about some Japanese bees and their tendency to attack anything dark-coloured that approaches their hives.
July 18th, 2008
Things I Have Learned and Bees.
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Beppo was bilked by Frabbo, so he plotted his revenge. Beppo came armed with a stiletto. We are in
They say that Frabbo walked away unscathed that day in 1566. But he never again bilked in
Aboard ship, Frabbo considered the rigging. All those skeins and knots reminded him of the plots in which he had so loved to become entangled. But for Frabbo a
Frabbo’s brain became dizzy at the exotic strangeness of the
Frabbo’s tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth and he scampered into the interior naked and loose of limb. The interior was a wild place of dripping foliage and shrieking birds and globular fruits. Frabbo found it horrible.
Come 1576 and Frabbo is enswathed in turquoise raiment. He is deep in the interior and when he snaps his fingers monkey acolytes do his bidding. Ah, but hacking through fronds and creepers comes bilked Beppo at the head of a clanking platoon. It will be man versus monkey, and much blood will be spilt.
July 18th, 2008
Prose.
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Bring me a cuppet of foaming grog! And bring me some rags to mop up the spillage! Bring me a lantern to light my way through the gruesome lanes of your gruesome village!
Bring me gas trapped inside a bulb! Bring me a pig on a platter of lead! Bring me your huddled, bring me your sick, bring me your puny and bring me your dead!
Bring me things I haven’t asked for yet! Bring me a badger torn from its sett! Bring me creatures from the bottom of the sea twitching and flapping and flailing in nets!
Bring me the kind of aftershave used by Peter Wyngarde playing Jason King! God blast you, bring me just about anything!
There is nothing that I do not crave as I sit here in my cold damp cave, banished from the palace where I sat on a divan, the potentate of my vanquished clan. We were vanquished good and proper by the Men With Whisks. It was all recorded on compact discs. They even had a backing band as they smashed each bone and skull. I can’t be sure, but I think it was Jethro Tull.
July 17th, 2008
Prose.
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For a long time, I used to go to bed early. And I mean early. Sometimes I would go to bed a mere ten or fifteen minutes after I’d got up. My alarm would clang, I’d bound out of bed hale and hearty, splash my face with icy water from the spigot, gobble down some sponge cake with a dollop of marmalade, yawn, and stagger back into bed, and fall asleep, and dream. For much of this period it is probably true to say that I lived in dreamland rather than in the real world, although, maddeningly, I could never remember more than a few disconnected and unintelligible fragments of my dreams. I would wake with vague, fugitive visions of, for example, Hazel Blears juggling cream crackers and windswept moorland and albino hens in a concrete bath, but with not a clue as to the significance of any of them. I suppose I could have gone to see a psychic or a psychiatrist, if I desperately needed to know the meaning of my dreams, but I rarely stayed awake long enough to make that possible, and it was very unlikely that I could get one to come to me, given the forbidding nature of my home.
I lived, at this time, at the top of a tower on a promontory lashed by gales. The tower was blackened with grime and weatherbeaten and crumbling. The promontory, too, was crumbling, perceptibly, great chunks of it breaking off and falling into the sea every day. I knew that I would have to move out of the tower, to find a safer haven, but to do so I would have to remain awake for at least an hour or two. I preferred to sleep, and to dream.
The bed I have referred to was not really a bed, as you would understand it. It could more accurately be described as a mat of scattered hay and straw, with the occasional lump of mud and clod of muck tucked here and there. For a pillow, I had a long-dead grunting hog, expertly preserved and stuffed by an equally long-dead taxidermist. My duvet was one of the first of its kind to be imported into this country. It was Teutonic, puffy and bulked out with compressed stable gas, and grease-resistant. No wonder I slept so soundly. My room at the top of the tower had once been a bird-loft, and the skeletons of a number of starlings and robins were still strewn on the rafters and sills. No birds came while I lived there, for birds have always been fearful of me, even when I am asleep.
Very, very occasionally, during these years, I would remain up and about for more than ten or fifteen minutes. Sometimes I shuffled down the rope-ladder to the foot of the tower to inspect the becrumblement of the promontory at close quarters. Sometimes I hied over to Old Ma Purgative’s clifftop superstore to fetch supplies of sponge cake and marmalade. Sometimes I fiddled about with the clanger on my alarm to try to muffle it a tad. Sometimes I taunted faraway birds by shaking a stick in the air and shouting. But mostly, in those days, I used to go to bed early.
July 17th, 2008
Prose.
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Following on from Corncrake Project, the first in a series of what might be called Hooting Yard’s Readers’ Digest-style digested news stories, here is another one. Actually, this one is so digested that I have plucked just a single phrase from it.
… tinkering with a generator, while handling a sausage …
If I end up posting more of these enticing little bagatelles, they will need a proper collective name. “Hooting Yard Digestive Biscuits”, perhaps.
July 17th, 2008
Things I Have Learned.
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For a long time, I used to go to bed early. Often, it was still light as I shut my bedroom door and drew the curtains and buried myself under my blankets. My home-made soundproofing, hundreds of corks glued to the bedroom walls, worked remarkably well, and I treasured the peace and quiet. In the rest of the chalet, the monkeys could do as they pleased. I was safe in my bed, and undisturbed.
Ever since I could remember I had wanted to live surrounded by monkeys. As a tiny tot, I made toy monkeys out of pipe-cleaners and pin-cushions. I begged my parents to buy me a real monkey from a monkey shop, not knowing that there were no such shops in our Alpine fastness. As an evil nine-year-old, I planned to abduct a monkey or two from a zoo, but I was an inept little criminal and won myself only a fortnight in a Blunkett Camp For Miscreant Hobbledehoys. During a fractious adolescence I was diverted by brandy and floozies and high-tar Peruvian cigarettes, and it was only when I gained my majority and was installed in my own chalet courtesy of a wealthy uncle that my monkey mania reasserted itself.
Uncle Arpad was himself fond of monkeys, though not, as in my case, to the point of unreason. He had made his fortune in the windmill and plankton trades, and had retired to a chalet just up the mountain from the one he bought for me. Every day, I took the funicular railway up to visit him for breakfast, and over a dish of brisket and jugged partridge he told stories of his past, and of other people’s pasts, and of invented pasts, and he invariably ended these sometimes tedious monologues by encouraging me to live my dreams. He was, I think, a bitter man who regretted that he had devoted his life to windmills and plankton, and he wanted better for me. Descending the mountain after breakfast each day, tramping slowly in my snowshoes, I had time to ponder what I really wanted in life, and I knew in the very depths of my soul that my greatest desire was to live surrounded by monkeys.
Sometimes I carried on down the mountain past my own chalet until I reached the village in the foothills, where I called in to the Blue Bat tavern for a chat with Popsie Von Straubenzee. Popsie was one of the floozies I had dallied with in my debauched teenage years, and now she was older and wiser and ran a stamp collecting club in one of the mountain’s many sanatoria, where weaklings lay slowly perishing on balconies. These days, my tipple was aerated lettucewater, but Popsie could still knock back the brandy like a rough tough matelot, and she did so, day in day out, seemingly with no ill effects. It was to Popsie that I confided my dreams and desires, and it was Popsie who helped them come true.
She, too, had a wealthy uncle, also called Arpad, and he was a monkey hunter. All I had to do, she explained, was to tell her how many monkeys I wanted, of what types, and she would arrange for Uncle Arpad to hunt them down, stun them with darts, put them into comas and into crates, and have them delivered to my door. And it would not cost me a penny, she added, because Uncle Arpad liked nothing better than monkey hunting, he hunted monkeys with childish glee, and he was both generous and unhinged.
So I drew up a list and gave it to Popsie, and one bright March morning the skiing post office person bashed his tippy stick on my chalet door and I opened it to find several crates containing sleeping monkeys, addressed to me. Popsie’s Uncle Arpad was as good as his word.
I had grown used to living alone, the silence broken only by an occasional yodelling wayfarer or an avalanche. And so, for some weeks, things continued, for each of my monkeys had been placed into an induced coma for the long journey from their jungle domains, and I had absolutely no idea how to snap them out of it. On one of my post-breakfast trips to the Blue Bat I asked Popsie to find out from her uncle how to awaken my monkeys, but she told me, with tears in her eyes, that Arpad had been blown to bits in the Hindenburg airship disaster. I went up to the counter to buy her another brandy to comfort her, and while I waited to be served, I browsed through a copy of the Readers’ Digest that someone had discarded. How fortunate that I did so! For there, in between articles such as “I Am John’s Ear” and “Forty Years Of Hell In A Bauxite Mine” was a piece entitled “Six Easy Steps To Awaken A Monkey From A Medically Induced Coma”. I tore the pages out of the magazine, got Popsie her brandy, kissed her goodbye, and, too impatient to wait for the funicular railway, clambered panting up the mountain to my chalet and my sleeping monkeys.
There were six simple steps, and I had six monkeys. Even before the crates were delivered, I had chosen names for them. My other great enthusiasm, apart from monkeys, was the Merovingian kings, so the squirrel monkey was called Clovis, the two howler monkeys were Dagobert and Clotaire, the owl monkey was Pepin The Middle, the capuchin was Theuderic, and the spider monkey was Guntram. I followed the instructions in the Readers’ Digest with the utmost diligence, disinfecting my pliers, rinsing out the retort with boiling hot soapy water, and even donning a white lab coat to give myself an air of boffinhood. In truth, I did not actually have a lab coat, so I stitched together a couple of Popsie’s capes that I found in my wardrobe and steeped them in bleach.
One by one, my monkeys woke from their slumbers and began to caper about the chalet. They were excessively rowdy, quite uncontrollable, and fantastically destructive. Shortly afterwards, I glued hundreds of corks to my bedroom wall, and began to go to bed early. My monkeys have never stopped their antics. I love them so.
I have been speculating of late on how Dobson would have fared in the age of blogging. The common view is that the great pamphleteer would have flourished in this medium, but I wonder if that is true. He would not, of course, be “out of print” as is so regrettably the case, and I suppose most of us feel a pang when we imagine how tremendous it would be to log on to our computers to find fresh blog posts from so fecund a writer. And how piquant it would be to be able to add our own comments to whatever he had to say for himself on any particular day, rather than, as we must do, simply scribbling private marginalia in the few battered and dog-eared pamphlets we may have managed to scavenge from junk shops and rummage sales and community hub bazaars and compost heaps.
Yet the more I think about it, the more I remain unconvinced that Dobson would have taken to blogging as effortlessly as a swan to a pond. The reasons for my hesitancy are threefold. As I am sure you are aware, dealing with three folds all in one go can cause nervous overexcitement and lead to the vapours and the jangles, so I am not going to talk about the first two folds. The third fold, however, is something I feel sufficiently robust to attend to this evening.
As it happens, a few weeks ago I was asked to give a talk on Dobson to the inmates of a
Arriving at the field, having been debouched from a charabanc, I was somewhat upset to find that Maud was not there to welcome me. In fact, so shredded were my nerves that I let out a great cry of grief. I was hurried into a tent by some sort of aide de camp, who gave me a reviving brain tonic and explained that Maud had been called away to an important meeting. Apparently, there was a to-do about the
Having swallowed my second helping of brain tonic, I was led by the aide de camp back out of the tent and across the field to where my audience of sparky tinies was waiting. It was a terrific field. Apart from mud and grass, it was rife with field bindweed, Convolvulus arvensis, with its pink and white flowers, with wayfaring trees, Viburnum lantana, deciduous shrubs – not trees, despite the name – close to wild guelder, all red and black berries, with common or redleg persicaria, Polygonum persicaria, a weed with blotches on its leaves, allied to the bistorts, and with lady’s smock, Cardamine pratensis, a white or lilac flower often found in damp meadows and fields such as this. Those, at least, were the four plants I was able to identify before I was bundled, none too gently, down into a ditch and from there into a subterranean tunnel. Most tunnels are subterranean of course, it goes with the territory, but I am using the words of the aide de camp, who, as she shoved me in the small of my back, hissed “Come! Come! We must enter this subterranean tunnel!”
I was perplexed, for as far as I was aware the pupils eagerly awaiting my Dobson lecture were sitting on a tarpaulin in the field above. Equally perplexing was to see that the tunnel was lit by lanterns dangling from hooks hammered into its ceiling, and that interspersed with the lanterns dangled birdcages in which perched blind thrushes and sparrows. I stuck my heel into the muck underfoot and rounded upon the aide de camp, demanding an explanation.
“This is where we bring the blind birds,” she said.
I accepted that at face value, and she persuaded me to continue ahead until we reached a cavernous underground storage facility. It was enormous and chilly. I do not think I have ever seen so many packets of biscuits stacked so neatly in one place. There were piles and piles and piles of them, creating a narrow passageway in the centre. I noted that to one side, all the biscuits were Huntley & Palmer’s, and to the other they were Peek Frean’s.
“You may pick a packet as your payment,” announced the aide de camp.
Now, Maud and I had not discussed my reimbursement for talking to the tinies about Dobson and blogging. There are some people – there are even, I regret to say, some Dobsonists – who insist upon cash when delivering talks upon the great out of print pamphleteer. Naturally, I am not averse to a fistful of readies, but it seems to me that spreading the word about Dobson is too urgent an activity to depend necessarily upon the receipt of grubby banknotes. Thus it is that, in the past, I have accepted payment in various kinds, including a plastic siphon, a pochette stuffed with the hair of a hanged criminal, a torn and besmirched copy of Old Cackhead’s Almanack, a share in the ownership of a lame pig, several towels and rags, glue, pips, lemon curd, a picture postcard from Innsmouth, and a cake fork. You might think, then, that I would happily snatch a packet of biscuits from this vast underground pantry and return to the surface ready and willing to give my talk. On any other day, I may well have done so. But now I was overcome with pangs of pity for the blind birds in cages dangling from hooks in the tunnel, so I told the aide de camp that I would forego my Huntley & Palmer’s or Peek Frean’s, and instead wanted her to release the thrushes and sparrows and to return them to the blue overarching firmament.
She looked at me as if I were bonkers and explained that, being blind, the birds would surely be savaged by other, bigger, predatory birds, such as hawks and vultures and modern pterodactyls within minutes of being allowed to flap away into the sky. This sounded like a pretty cogent argument, but I questioned her about the so-called “modern pterodactyls”, birds I had not heard of before and ones I felt sure she had made up on the spur of the moment as a way of persuading me to take a packet of biscuits as Maud originally intended. The aide de camp told me something new to me, that the British actor Richard Attenborough ruled as a potentate over a remote island where he reared modern pterodactyls and other primeval beasts, and should any of the blind thrushes or sparrows manage to get that far before being pecked to pieces by hawks or vultures, they would surely come a-cropper in the fierce razor-sharp talons of one, or more, of Attenborough’s avian brood. I happened to have the numeric protocol co-ordinates for the aged thespian embedded in my portable metal tapping machine, and considered directing a transmission requesting confirmation of this startling yet somehow credible information from him, until I recalled that Maud Sprain had deliberately sited her
For some reason I could not fathom, the tunnel’s exit opened upon a different part of the ditch from where we had entered. As we emerged, I saw that in order to get back to the surface we would have to fight our way through a tangle of gooseberries, goosegrass, and goosefoot. The gooseberry is a low, spiny bush with globular green fruits. Goosegrass, also known as cleavers, is a close relative of bedstraws, which straggles over vegetation, clinging to it and to clothing with the tiny prickles on its stems, leaves, and fruits. Goosefoot is a genus of weeds with tiny green flowers in leafy or leafless spikes, the commonest being Fat Hen, Red Goosefoot, which often has reddish leaves, Many-seeded Goosefoot, and Good King Henry. The ditch, though, was entangled with Stinking Goosefoot, which smells repulsively of stale fish. Earlier, when I told you about the field bindweed, the wayfaring trees, the persicaria, and the lady’s smock in the field, I gave you the Latin names. But time presses on, so if you want to know the Latin for the gooseberry and goosegrass and goosefoot you will have to look them up yourself. I recommend a reference work such as The Penguin Dictionary Of British Natural History by Richard and Maisie Fitter (1967). As well as telling you about plants named after geese, this invaluable book is packed with hundreds of entries on birds, butterflies, fish, flowers, fungi, insects, moths, reptiles, and trees. It even tells you the difference between a stoat and a weasel, if that is the kind of thing you need to know.
The tinies were sat upon their tarpaulin, awaiting my talk, but getting to them was clearly going to be a struggle. According to the bells clanging from the old bell-tower, I was due to speak in five minutes time. The aide de camp was fossicking in her pippy bag, so I asked her what she was looking for.
“One of two things,” she said, “Either a scented linen rectangle to hold over my nose to counter the overwhelming stench of stale fish, or a big sharp slicing implement, as sharp as the talons of one of Richard Attenborough’s modern pterodactyls, with which to slice and hew through these plants named after geese. I am sure I must have one or other in my pippy bag, if not both.”
I could see why Maud had made so resourceful a woman her aide de camp, and wondered what else might lurk in the pippy bag, but I was far too polite to ask. I drummed my fingertips against my temples as the rummaging continued, conscious that time was ticktocking away on the clock on the old bell-tower, and that we were in grave danger of being late for the tinies. Maud had stipulated that I had to begin my talk on time, for only by doing so could I hope to placate the strange gods who loomed over the
There were scarce forty seconds to go when she shrieked a triumphant cry, slapped a scented linen rectangle over her nose and sliced at the gooseberry, goosegrass and goosefoot with a big sharp slicer, and with one bound we jumped free of the ditch and pelted towards the tinies. A second aide de camp had given each of them a tumbler of purple pop and a radish to keep them quiet, so I was met with absolute silence as I took my place on the speaking mat. I glanced up, and allowed myself a small wrinkly smile as I saw the goose-gods flock away into the aether, and then I tapped my fingertips upon my cuff and cleared my throat.
“Greetings, tinies,” I boomed, my spine straight and my bouffant unruffled, “I am here today to talk upon the topic If Dobson Were Alive Today, Would He Be A Blogger Or Would He Continue To Churn Out Pamphlets? I am sure some of you think you know the answer. Well, I have thought long and hard about this question, and my conclusion may surprise you. You see, I don’t think Dobson would ever have become a blogger, for one simple reason. Bloggers type on computer keyboards, but Dobson always wrote in a little notepad, with a pencil. I rest my case.”
And that, in a nutshell, is the essence of the third fold in my threefold argument. If you are avid for the details of the first and second folds, I may be tempted to tell, but only if you send me some biscuits. I leave it up to you whether you send Huntley & Palmer’s or Peek Frean’s.
A letter arrives in Mr Key’s postbag:
Sir : I find it promptly tricky that during your latest musings on the life of Danny Blanchfowler, you failed to mention Dobson’s seminal pamphlet on the history and origins of the Fred Jessop Cup On the history and origins of the Fred Jessop Cup (out of print).
I happened upon this pamphlet by chance in the August of 1987, whilst attending a car boot sale in Swivenhoe, as my life then mainly consisted of scouring car boots in the vein hope of unearthing a Penny Black. I was, anyway, passing uninterested by tens and tens of jalopies full to their brims with tat their owners were peddling: old lampshades, coloured rock, Ladybird books, copper barometers, worn out bicycle tyres, Clarice Cliffe, rusty automata, dog-shaped humidors, dirty vestas and assorted treen. One car boot though was devoid of tat, save for a box filled with yellowing paperbacks and crumpled ordnance survey maps. Having a penchant for ordnance surveys of the
I snatched it from the box with great gusto, and upon examination of its condition, promptly haggled the slovenly oaf manning the car boot down to thruppence and a glimpse at my prized Cuckoo’s egg, for purchase of the pamphlet.
Upon returning to my hovel, I quickly consumed the contents of the pamphlet - savouring every moment, as respite from the squalid little life I led at the time. It is what I then unearthed, ‘neath its tattered pages, for which I am bothering to pester you.
Quoth Dobson:
“the Fred Jessop cup, awarded once a year to the winners of the Fred Jessop Cup association football competition, has several peculiar mysteries surrounding it - not least, the matter of it’s disappearance in 1966, the year it was won by Crackling Northwich. The 1965/66 season had gone splendidly well for Crackling Northwich, a team made up of workers from De Bruuin’s bulb factory. This small town club used to the monotonous pinch and shove of the Rumbelow’s Division Four (North) had, under the guidance of Keswick De Bruuin, who acted as their team coach, chairman, janitor, physiotherapist, coach driver, notary and keeper of the club mascot (a rather disgruntled Kittiwake called Margaret), achieved a miraculous cup run. Keswick’s team had battled their way past the Wigan Black Bull, Alsager Fare, and Hove Young Offender’s Institute in the early rounds.
Then, after drawing a plum tie away to Tooting Mantrap (one of the larger teams in their day), Crackling Northwich won through into the Semi-Final of the Fred Jessop Cup. Winning eighteen nil, with champion booter Carlo Weinnacht scoring a personal best of two. On the day of the draw at the football association headquarters in
Suspicion fell immediately upon Keswick De Bruuin, who had previous for the theft of an elderly Boltonian twenty years hence, and for whom the Fred Jessop Cup represented a golden opportunity for some scrap metal smelting. Keswick, naturally in denial, retreated to his hotel room with the entire Northwich Crackling squad, and was not heard from again until three days later when the news broke that the cup had been found. A part-time bomb disposal officer, Wally Sandwich, had been walking his collie, Sniffles, around the outskirts of a disused children’s recreational area, when the dog had indicated the need to answer nature’s call by giving Wally an uncomfortable glance. Hurrying over to a swing, Wally saw metal glinting and gleaming from underneath a climbing frame. When he went to investigate, there, crudely wrapped in a soiled copy of Razzler, was the Fred Jessop Cup in all its unerring glory.
Three weeks later, Crackling Northwich were to defeat
I wonder Sir, whether the Nobby Blanchfowler referred to therein is a relative, however distant, of footballing prometheus Danny Blanchfowler?
I eagerly await your reply.
Yours, in the bath,
Colonel Philomena Crow
Well, Colonel, I can confirm that Nobby Blanchfowler was indeed the twin brother of Danny Blanchfowler. Indeed, so close were the twins that they shared the same neck. Further information on this rare medical condition can be found in the song “Charlie And Charlie” on Slapp Happy’s album Acnalbasac Noom. I ought to point out, however, that the Fred Jessop Cup bears no relation whatsoever to the similarly-named Fred Jesson Cup, as mentioned in Danny Blanchfowler : A Life In Football. The latter trophy, of course, bears the name of the fantastically exciting husband of Laura Jesson, played by Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter (1945).
July 15th, 2008
Prose and Dobson.
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