including Richard Milhous Nixon, bismuth & titanium, Istvan & Zoltan, Dobson, badgers, potatoes, pails, James Joyce, and a burlap sack of old crocuses.
“He [V. S. Naipaul] now hated the very word ‘Scandinavian’ as ‘full of ice and death and sullen coitus’.” — Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia's Shadow
Quetzalcoatl is the feathered serpent, an Aztec deity, as worshipped by Christopher Plummer in his weird performance as Atahualpa in The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969). In a better world, Plummer would have used the same acting technique (and terrific strangulated high-pitched squawking voice) in his earlier role as Baron Von Trapp in The Sound of Music. Imagining this is always a good way to cheer oneself up.
Yesterday's quotation from What Dress Makes Of Us showed what a tremendous writer Dorothy Quigley was. Pansy Cradledew - much taken by the book - has suggested providing a link so that readers can enjoy La Quigley's matchless prose, as well as enjoying illustrations like this: (click on it and it will take you to the book).
“Crikey!” exclaimed Istvan, “What in the name of heaven is that?”
His twin brother Zoltan looked up from the book he was reading. “Istvan, calm down,” he drawled, “You know I hate to be interrupted in my reading, especially when the book in my hands is the Journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins & I have just got to the entry for that most exciting day, 27th April 1871, when the poet, quote, mesmerised a duck with chalk lines drawn from her beak sometimes level & sometimes forwards on a black table, unquote.”
“How on earth can you immerse yourself in the prose of a Victorian Jesuit,” screeched Istvan, “When I am about to be waylaid by a preposterously complicated mechanical contraption somehow imbued with almost human malevolence?”
Zoltan yawned. “I have long been fascinated by Hopkins,” he averred, “Incidentally, were you aware, o twin, that the nuns whose drowning was commemorated in that majestic poem The Wreck of the Deutschland lie buried in Saint Patrick's Roman Catholic Cemetery in Leytonstone, east London, & that I have placed flowers on the grave? Peonies, I recall, or mayhap they were pinks, or pansies.”
“Eek!” yelled Istvan. Zoltan cast his eyes in the direction indicated by the frantic gesticulations his twin brother made to complement his frightful ‘eek’.
“Golly!” gasped Zoltan, his eyes popping. For trundling at inhuman speed towards Istvan was a monstrous steam-powered engine, bulky & strange, built of tungsten, titanium & tin, & seemingly alive with a perplexing array of hooters, levers, flaps, nozzles, chains, bleepers, consoles, klaxons, chocks, struts, decoy shields, Coddington lenses, batteries, prongs, bits of corrugated cardboard & Mackenzie beams. It was the Indigestion Machine!
“Oh! the mocking diablery in strings, wisps of untidy hair, queer trimmings, and limp hats. Alas! that they should have such impish power to detract from the dignity of woman and render man absurd.” — Dorothy Quigley, What Dress Makes Of Us (1897)
Little is known of the origins of football, a game which is today one of the most popular sports throughout the Northern Lands. According to De Smet [see The Punnet, Vol XVI No.9], football began when tribal elders in the hinterland around Hoon took to mucking about after the annual ritual ostrich-battering. Thumper, on the other hand, has argued in a number of persuasive essays that the sordid practices of a family living in a cave near Bodger's Spinney were the true origins of the game. Either of these theories may be true, as might thousands upon thousands of others. But let us not tarry in the past.
The rules of football are stupendously complex. The rubric itself fills hundreds of huge volumes, and interpretative texts, analyses and commentaries have accumulated at such a rate that entire libraries are now devoted to the subject. That being the case, it is impractical in this essay to do more than sketch the merest outline. So let us draw breath, take stock, make a cup of tea, twang a ukulele, skip frolicsome thro' ling and heather, rap curses at hunched louts, sprinkle talc upon our scalps, whisk an egg, brush our teeth, impale a mothball, crack a biscuit, mumble a homily, tie a ship's knot in a necklace, stoke up the fire, spit on the coals, irk a butcher, crick our necks, stamp on a bee, shovel grit outside the police station, howl at the Wergo, mitigate a plea, fold a crocus, employ a grotesquerie and put a flea in its ear: come follow me as I expound the laws of football.
There are two teams of thirty one players each, plus a moderator, two assistant moderators, a plinth sergeant, a brazil nut attendant, and a person holding a tape measure. The teams are dubbed “Bark” and “Sap”: these terms are as arbitrary as the use of white and black to differentiate chess pieces, or the pigs and cones used in the game of lanternjaw. Each team consists of ten jack hulberts, ten cicely courtneidges, six badgers, a winch, a hurdle, a cake, a denial, and a pond. Only two badgers may be fielded at one time, unless the winch is out of play. Players may make use of bats, sticks, hooked poles, claw-hammers, lances, ballbearings, fenceposts, swords, bayonets, doorhandles, fireworks and icing sugar. At the beginning of play the moderator tosses on to the rink three balls: one is of leather, one of bladder, and one of zinc. Surprisingly, the rules say nothing about the size of the balls, and there is great variation among those commonly in use.
The object of the game is for the Bark team to puncture the leather and bladder balls beyond repair and to hide the zinc ball for a period of twenty three hours, while the Sap team must try to protect all three balls by putting them in wicker containers and keeping the opposing side away from them for an identical period. The field of play is called the pitch, rink, arena, clat, ford, or basin. It is marked out with an intricate tangle of signs and symbols and is usually waterlogged.
A true appreciation of football is hampered by the difficulty of understanding the subsidiary objectives - or “planks” — of the game. Either of the assistant moderators may impose planks at the start of the game or in the intervals between fits. There is an enormous list of planks in the rule-books from which selections may be made. A brief sample here can do no more than suggest an idea of the subtlety of thought which has developed in this aspect of football over the years. Taken literally at random, the list of planks includes the following: digging a trench across the rink; sawing off the handles of the opposing team's swords; planning, preparing, cooking, serving and eating a gala pie; synchronised palpitation; instilling an overwhelming sense of wistfulness in one's team-mates; dismantling the wicket; holding an accordion contest.
Penalties for foul play are vicious, arbitrary and senseless. Only the moderator and the plinth sergeant are permitted to impose penalties, and they must consult with each other, using an intricate system of hand signals, before the penalty can be implemented. Please do not be given the impression that there is any element of violence in the penalties. Their viciousness, arbitrariness and senselessness are of a much higher order, inconceivable to those who have not themselves played the game.
The kit, or strip, is of admirable simplicity. The Sap team appears naked, with the small concession to modesty of skin-tight, flesh-coloured tunics. (In this case, flesh-coloured means precisely what it says. The garments are dyed to the exact shade of the individual player's skin by experts retained by the Football Association.) The Bark team, on the other hand, is kitted out in voluminous clothing suitable for an Antarctic expedition - all furs, hides and swaddling, with plenty of pockets, pouches, flaps, zips, buttons, toggles, belts and buckles. As the game is played throughout the year, the Sap team has a natural advantage in the summer months, while the Bark team will tend to perform better in the biting chill of winter.
But enough of these confounded rules! As it is, they are elastic, very elastic. So much depends upon the temperament of the brazil nut attendant, in whose hands the very nature of the game can be transformed, to the extent that the rules I have so patiently explained would be unrecognisable to you, dear reader. The commentaries on the role of this official are abstruse and profound, and are deserving of years and years of study. Bagshaw and Taplow, in their invaluable tome The Brazil Nut Attendant : Retribution & Paralysis, have come closest to providing a manageable overview of the topic, although their tendency to refer to the game as “socker” is regrettable.
Before bringing this essay to a sprightly close, it will be helpful to give the reader some idea of the game's organisation, particularly in the professional sphere. The two chief administrative bodies are the Football Association and the Football League. The former is a severe and monolithic body which ensures that the rules of the game are adhered to by all parties at all times. It has a staff of over eight hundred scriveners, clerks and lackeys who work by the light of just four Tilly lamps. These saintly men and women spend their working lives issuing lengthy directives couched in a language so mesmeric that the recipients throw them at once into the dustbin without even trying to wring any sense out of them. This cavalier attitude has its repercussions, of course. From time to time, the Association sends out Special Inspectors, highly-trained gits plucked from sinks of corruption, with murder in their hearts and blackjacks in their fists. No football club visited by a Special Inspector has ever dared transgress the rules again. The Association holds an annual competition, the winning team of which is awarded the Fred Jesson Cup, named after Laura's husband in the film Brief Encounter. The cup is a model of a pollarded willow made out of battered tin. Birdhole's mighty six-volume From Custard To Wooziness provides a splendid history of the contest, and bravely addresses the more arcane aspects of the marking system, contemplation of which has led countless devotees to a sordid, drink-sodden demise.
Of the Football League, however, there is nothing remotely interesting to be said.
The picture shows the tormented genius of Dynamo Blister Lane, Ted Cack, in his heyday.
“Like love, perfect inanity casteth out fear.” — Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say
One's thoughts turn, as they so often do, to Richard Milhous Nixon. One thinks of a certain jowliness, of the sweat and five o' clock shadow which, it is said, lost him the televised 1960 election debate with Kennedy. One thinks of a little dog called Checkers. One recalls - with a jolt - that he was raised as a Quaker. One thinks of cold rage, bitterness, and “expletives deleted”. Inevitably, one thinks of Watergate, and one considers that, thirty years after Nixon's resignation, -gate is the suffix-of-choice for lazy journalists writing about any and every political scandal. And one is thankful for that laziness, because it is so amusing to see how short a time it takes from the first stirrings of a scandal to the first appearance in print of the -gate word. Last year, for example, when the ex-Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith (“the Quiet Man”) stood accused of misusing public funds to pay his wife, it took only about forty eight hours for the episode to be dubbed Betsygate. All of which brings us to the series of events which, had they occurred after 1972, would no doubt have been called Van Dongelbrackegate. See below.
Joost Van Dongelbracke, the Suburban Shaman, was, as we have learned (see 24th February), once employed as a janitor. He lived an obscure and - arguably - blameless life. Ever cantankerous, he often found himself at odds with the head of the Fireworks Factory, whose official title, at the initiative of the Human Resources department, was Gubernator. Van Dongelbracke, however, was merely a janitor. He spent many long hours in his shed, poring over nautical charts and beetle diagrams, plotting his future. Who could have guessed that the actuality would be even more preposterous than his dreams? And his daydreams were fervid, to say the least, hence his frequent run-ins with the Gubernator, who expected, not unreasonably, to see janitorial tasks completed. Rather than sweeping a corridor or emptying wastepaper bins, however, Van Dongelbracke was more likely to be found intoning “Head… thorax… abdomen” in a voice like a rasp, as a kettle boiled away for his umpteenth flask of tea and the candles in his shed sputtered and smoked. So far, so uneventful, regardless of the Gubernator's irritation. It was the morning Van Dongelbracke arrived at work having dyed his head blue that things began to change.
Note : It is quite clear that the above paragraph offers neither jot nor tittle of information about the events we have suggested could be called - retrospectively - Van Dongelbrackegate. Please accept the editor's profuse apologies. Either that or go and dye your head blue.
This is, indeed, Split, shown here as a taster for a forthcoming Hooting Yard series in which Matilda Spamclot will be writing about her bicycle journey from Split in Croatia to Splat in Cornwall. Says Matilda : “My previous trip was from the Finnish town of Hell to Hull, and Split to Splat seemed equally enticing! Gosh, I had so many adventures on the way! The incident with the postman, the cormorant and the lid of a bleach bottle doesn't tell you the half of it! Look out for this exciting new series, posted exclusively to Hooting Yard! Yes, I know, I know, I am overfond of exclamation marks! I'm a proper caution!”
“He heard only the soughing of the wind, the hissing pelt of raindrops in the scrub oak. Sickened fear assailed him, then; fear, not for himself but for the girl he loved. He remembered the dark, sinister threats uttered by Lige Ludwell, and he recalled how Lige's daughter had died. Maybe Brenda was even now hanging suspended head-downward somewhere, her life-blood being drained from her veins, either by vengeful clansmen or by something worse . . . such as an undead vampire-corpse . . . Until tonight, he would have scoffed at such an eldritch, hellish fancy. But in view of what had already happened, a cold slime of horror slid into his marrow.” — Robert Leslie Bellem, Blood For The Vampire Dead
A number of readers have written to request further information about the 1955 Festival of Argumentative Music held in Ülm (see Lothar Preen News, 3rd February). And guess what - Dobson was there! Bizarrely, he never published his observations as a pamphlet. The text given here has been transcribed by Marigold Chew from a dictaphone recording made by Dobson which was lost for many years, and only recently came to light, hidden behind the pipes of an intricate plumbing system in the basement of the Pang Hill Fireworks Factory. What it was doing there is anybody's guess. Dobson is known to have had various altercations with the janitor of the factory, one Joost Van Dongelbracke, who later became famous - or infamous - as the “Suburban Shaman”, founder of a cult which gained an incredible four million adherents across Europe and North America in the 1970s before imploding in ghastly circumstances. Persistent rumours that President Nixon was a member have never been proved one way or the other. Whatever, as the young people say. What concerns us here is the Dobson transcript.
Dear Mr Key : Glancing at the section entitled Make Your Own Glue (23rd February), I misread the third of your cut-out-and-keep labels as “Nameless God”. I very much like the idea of keeping a little tin marked “Nameless God” on a shelf, possibly in the kitchen, and wonder if you could provide a label accordingly. Furthermore, I wonder if Hooting Yard readers can make suggestions as to what I could actually keep in the tin? I am not particularly religious, but this has set me to thinking that it would be a good way to nurture my spirituality. Any ideas? Yours sincerely, Tim Thurn
Dear Uncle Dan
I have been given a burlap sack full of old crocuses and I have no idea what to do with it. Please help.
Valentine Smew
Uncle Dan says: Well, Valentine, whenever I read the word “crocuses” I think of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, also called kado, or “the way of the flowers”. Get yourself a vase and transfer the crocuses from the sack. Throw the sack away. Now - be deft! Manipulate the crocuses with delicacy, taste and vision. There is, of course, the possibility that you lack these qualities, in which case you may be better occupied throwing the crocuses away and retaining the burlap sack. With a pair of scissors and a sewing machine you will soon be able to turn it into a mightily uncomfortable vest which can be wrapped up and given as a Christmas or birthday gift to a devout Roman Catholic. Jesuit priests in particular are known to be fond of such garb. If you do not number any Jesuits among your acquaintances, I would recommend visiting the SJ Web, an excellent resource “connecting Jesuits and friends around the world”. The Lord be with you, Valentine Smew.
“As far back as 1551 we know of the existence of Poestyen as a natural cure, and Sir Spencer Wells, the great English doctor, wrote about these waters in 1888. They are chiefly good for rheumatism, gout, neuralgia, the strengthening of broken bones, strains, and also for scrofula. On the premises there is a quaint museum with crutches and all sort of sticks and invalid chairs left there by their former owners in grateful acknowledgment of the wonderful waters and mire that had healed them.” — H. Tornai de Koever, Hungarian Baths and Resorts
A number of readers have suggested that Hooting Yard's vision of the natural world is an extremely narrow one, overpopulated by birds, with the occasional badger thrown in, and all other life-forms excluded. There is, I suspect, some justice in this. You are more likely to come upon, let's say, a list of three-letter bird-names (auk, cob, emu, hen, jay, kea, moa, owl, pen, poe, roc, tit, tui) than an equivalent catalogue of bears, insects, or horses. As a corrective to this tunnel vision, reader Matt Hamilton has sent in this delightful picture of a fish. Matt lives on, or near, the banks of the Potomac, I believe, so this would appear to be a drawing based on natural observation.
The glands of the investing tissue secrete lime and deposit it always submerged. These arrest the spat at the moment of emission. They detach with a hook the piles covered with fascines and branches, if we can use the term, buried in the sands or mud, their polypiferous portion sallying into the water. The raches, roughened and furrowed down the middle with pointed spiculae, or tubercular ramifications prolonged in a straight canal, the columellar edge sometimes callous - this is the critical moment for the hapless bivalve! He seizes it with a three-pronged fork, aiding also the functions of the stomach, filled with villainous green matter, which is conical, swollen in the middle, diminished, tapers off, producing new beings, covered with vibratile cilia, furnished with two fins, limited only by the length of the stem, but in a moment beginning to dissolve its corporation, a soft reticulated crust, or bark, full of little cavities. The hinder ones loosen their hold, with four or six rows of ambulacral pieces designated by the names of compass, plumula, bristling envelope, levelled bayonets, smothered. Last come the terrible and multiplied engines of calcareous immovable thread-like cirrhi with transverse bands, many of which crumble. Sometimes they are dredged.
Dissolve one ounce of borax in a pint of boiling water. Add two ounces of shellac, and boil in a covered vessel until the lac is dissolved. This forms a very useful and cheap cement. It answers well for pasting labels on tin, and withstands damp much better than the common glue. The liquid glue made by dissolving shellac in naphtha is dearer, soon dries up, and has an unpleasant smell. If you do not have any labels to paste on tin, here are some you can print out to start you off:
“‘You say,’ he mused, ‘that Mok came from some land once ravaged by war in which for five hundred years literacy had been a monopoly of the priesthood, in which the inhabitants lived in stone huts, and they were unfamiliar with bow-ties?’” — Dennis Plimmer, Man From The Wrong Time-Track
Where Ahab had acquired the pail, nobody knew. It was enormous, and painted cobalt blue. Ahab was driven to kick it with his muddy shoe. Months ago, he had filled it to the brim with goo. Some said the goo was the mashed-up remains of enemies Ahab slew. Within this noisome mash, fungi grew. Asked to account for his possession of both pail and contents, Ahab said “I haven't got a clue”. One theorist proposed that Ahab was seeking to patent a new and revolutionary glue. Around his head, winged monsters flew. Ahab was beginning to resemble that legend, the Wandering Jew. He took his pail into a chapel and rested it upon a pew. There is much in the foregoing on which to chew. Not one word of it is true.
Here is a second extract from Further Science : Book 20 by Norman Davies (see 20th January). This section is entitled “Hedge Auras”, and is once again [sic] throughout.
1. That April Foliage Plants are quilt padded.
2. May - pixie rain hoods / hysteria swarthy.
3. June - veiny crimp.
4. July - pastel / soft milky downy / silky.
5. August - thorny quilt /metal filigree.
6. September - pastel flame thorny and pointed hairs.
7. October - hard burn arrow blisters and round berries. Etc
An item in yesterday's Guardian mentioned the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (ROSPA). Let us consider the wonderful mysticism of that title. First, it is “Royal”, imbued with a lordly, monarchist ethos far above the common herd of humankind. Then, it is a “Society”, a fraternity or sorority one supposes, an esoteric band of adepts, sworn together by bonds of ritual secrecy. And on what purpose are they bent, these shadowy yet somehow noble figures? Nothing less than the “Prevention of Accidents”! If one thinks of an accident as an Act of God, which must surely be a common definition, then here we have a group dedicated to averting or undoing the whims of the Almighty. Whether that is heroic or abominable, it is incontrovertibly blasphemous. And so we find, lurking behind the innocuous “ROSPA”, that myth-shrouded medieval organisation the Mystical Order of Divine Saboteurs.
“Coleridge was a marvellous talker … Wordsworth and I called upon him one forenoon, when he was in a lodging off Pall Mall. He talked uninterruptedly for about two hours, during which Wordsworth listened to him with profound attention, every now and then nodding his head as if in assent. On quitting the lodging, I said to Wordsworth, 'Well, for my own part, I could not make head or tail of Coleridge's oration: pray, did you understand it?' ‘Not one syllable of it’, was Wordsworth's reply.” — Samuel Rogers, Table Talk
Here at Hooting Yard we are tireless in our endeavours to ensure that nothing significant in the world of the potato passes us by. At regular intervals, our agents fan out across the globe, armed with all sorts of exciting hi-tech equipment so that their reports can be transmitted back to us within nanoseconds. Agent Velma Nebraska has just sent this!
The Irish writer Roddy Doyle recently turned his piercing critical pea-shooter upon Joyce's Ulysses, accusing it, among other things, of being overlong and in need of a good editor. Mr Doyle, if you are going to criticise a book, at least do the job properly! Here are two excerpts from contemporary reviews of the great work:
“An immense mass of clotted nonsense” — Teachers' World
“The maddest, muddiest, most loathsome book issued in our own or any other time… inartistic, incoherent, unquotably nasty … a book that one would have thought could only emanate from a criminal lunatic asylum” — The Sphere
Who needs Google? Now, you can download completely free the DOBSON ÜBERTOOLBAR!
Change forever the way you browse the web! Using powerful search features, the DOBSON ÜBERTOOLBAR lets you cut through billions of pages of drivel and focus entirely on material which has been addressed by Dobson in his pamphlets, and nothing else! What else would you ever need to know?
For years, secret teams have been preparing an unimaginably vast Concordance Dobsonia. This has now been transferred to the web. Installation of the DOBSON ÜBERTOOLBAR - completely free of charge! - will give you the means to access this treasure trove.
Before navigating to DOWNLOAD, you must first read the USER'S AGREEMENT.
“A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again, or: a camel, a crepe, pins, spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal -- Panama!” — palindrome attributed to Guy Steele
During the 1950s, a God-fearing American television producer named Fret D. Chenoweth created a 43-part series called To Smite And Smite Again, a dramatisation of the Old Testament. The novelty of his treatment was that the Biblical stories were set in a modern high school and acted by fresh-faced youngsters with names like Tad, Biff, Chip, Huck & so on. When he died - curiously enough, in the 1958 Munich Air Disaster, surrounded by English footballers - Chenoweth's obituary described him as “the man who put the Chad in Nebuchadnezzar”.
The Tantarabim Carton was recovered from an old potting shed by Dobson, during one of his forays into what he called anarcho-'patapsychoarchaeolontology. It is a ceremonial carton which was used for unknown purposes during ceremonies prosecuted by the Bleach-Splattered Tantarabim Priesthood. Grim and horrifying these rituals may have been, but not the carton. It is 45 cm. in height, has a jewel-encrusted crimplene base, ivory fluting, ruched silk underbelts, hectic trimmings, a delightful milky-green ribbed spandole, villainous scraping marks, a gutta percha rim, opalescent bison-head motifs, swivelling glutinous beads inlaid with serried gems, fleur-de-lys hatching, precise web-and-tuck dufraiment, talc stipples, a riband nightside opening on the velveteen casing, some rather brusque kaolin relief work, tiny cack-iron clips, berry lagging, a splendid gilt Spode handle, and corky frets on the oversling. No picture is available.
Dobson tried to present his find to an art gallery somewhere on the hard, unyielding banks of a river in Yukon Country, but he was chased away by burly men with bludgeons, and was lucky to escape with his life. He subsequently wrote up the episode in his pamphlet Chucklesome Fripperies From My Notebooks (Lavender Series).
Corinna Mura, the nightclub singer who is famously seen belting out La Marseillaise in the film Casablanca, was the stepmother of the late, great Edward Gorey.
“Now, consider this Jesuit priest with a burst appendix. He shouts to his docent, ‘Fetch me more custard!’ But there is no more custard to be had. There will never again be custard, forever and ever. It is the end of custard.” — Gervase Beerpint, from Burst Appendix of a Jesuit & Other Prose Poems
Readers will recall the reference to Donald Turnupseed (see 4th January). I was intrigued, therefore, to read last week that the commander of the Alabama Air National Guard base where George W. Bush may or may not have served during the early 1970s was named William Turnipseed. Note that i in place of Donald's u.
Accounts of actors' careers invariably list their greatest roles: “over a long career she appeared as Ophelia, Gertrude, Clytemnestra!, Hedda Gabler, Queen Elizabeth the First…” “he played Hamlet, Lear, Napoleon, Churchill…”
How much more evocative are those parts so lovingly-described towards the end of credit sequences. Pansy Cradledew has a fondness for Woman in Beige Hat. My current favourite is Parent with Bird. To which one could add Man Guarding Fish, Haggling Monkey Seller, Limping Woman at Funeral, Lawyer in Raincoat, Grizzled Sailor 1 & Grizzled Sailor 2, Preening Customer, Man in Spats, and so many more. You can expect to see this paragraph regularly updated, and please send in your own favourites.
“It was a strange day, the day that I was born. The waves were beating against the lighthouse, and the wind was roaring and raging against everything. Had not the lighthouse been built very firmly into the strong solid rock, it, and all within it, must have been swept into the deep wild sea.” — Mrs O. F. Walton, Saved At Sea
How like the home life of your dear editor!
Now : you know and I know that Hooting Yard is not the place to visit to read the latest headlines. However, yesterday's Guardian had a small item that deserves attention:
A hotelier who refused to provide a free glass of tap water to a guest at a Christmas party has written to the guest suggesting she try living in the modern world. Anthony Cobley, manager of the three-star Atlantic hotel in Newquay, Cornwall, said in his letter to Sally Burchell, a social worker, that he could do without her as a customer. Ms Burchell, 43, had to pay 85p for a glass of mineral water during the Christmas lunch for 50 colleagues from the Cornwall child protection unit. Afterwards she wrote to the hotel saying that she thought it unfair when her party had paid £18.50 a head for their meal, and spent hundreds of pounds in addition on wine and beer. Mr Cobley wrote back: “I feel the need to enlighten you about the workings of the modern world. I buy water from the South West Water Company. I buy the glasses that the water is served in. I buy the ice that goes in the water and I buy the labour to serve the water. I provide the luxury surroundings for the water to be drunk in and again pay for the labour and washing materials to wash the glass after you have used it, and you think I should provide all of this free of charge. Customers who only drink water and complain about paying for it I can certainly do without.“
Those of you who - unaccountably - have not yet tried out Wednesday's recipe (see below, 4th February) may wish to take on board the following letter from reader Glyn Webster.
Would bismuth be an acceptable substitute for titanium in your latest recipe? I've alphabetically arranged my jars of substances, as Dobson suggested, so I've found I've been using a lot of bismuth in my cooking recently. (My jar of air is now completely empty, so that I cannot get the lid off to put more in.) Bismuth, although it is stodgy (number 83 on the periodic table, right after Lead), is widely recognised to be edible, even good for the digestion. It is the major ingredient of the popular American indigestion remedy Pepto-Bismol, and health-conscious hunters shoot their cirl bunting, moorhen, capercaillie, linnet or pukeko with bismuth shot. I'm not sure the same can be said of titanium.
If you decide to follow Glyn's advice, please examine with care the visual aid below:
Bismuth (left) & Titanium (right). One of them is chewier.
Thisis a parlour game, popular in Finland, in which the players must imagine themselves hopelessly trapped in an abandoned and waterlogged mineshaft, quite alone apart from the company of a notorious psychopathic murderer.
There are two sets of cards which must be shuffled mightily and placed face down on the table. From the first pack, players are allowed to choose three cards each, on which, when turned over, they will find written the name of an object or implement which may be used to effect an escape. A typical selection could read: a pin-cushion (innocent of pins); a small AA battery (dead); and twelve postage stamps from the Plunkett collection (non-adhesive).
A further three cards, from the second pack, are then chosen. These will give further crucial information about each player's entrapment, to wit, for example: your left leg is broken in three places; you have been blind since birth; and a starling has built its nest in your tremendous bouffant.
Players are each given forty five seconds to describe their method of escape, which must be plausible, vivid, logically watertight, and lead to the apprehension of the psychopath by doughty Inspector Calloway and his lame bloodhound, Tim.
“A man fond of jugglers will soon enough possess a wife whose name is Poverty. If it happens that the tricks of jugglers are forced upon your notice, endeavour to avoid them, and think of other things.” — St Bernard of Clairvaux
This is a splendid exercise first developed by brain guru Dennis Beerpint, brother of the poet Gervase Beerpint (see 3rd February). Go to a field. Attaching clamps to slats with quarter-inch gulliver bolts, smear some lattice-work with a decoction of binding-agents and thread the netting through tin clips, then dislodge the hasp on the paddle in order to provide enough purchase on the metal flanges, which should be arranged in rotation beside colour-coded pails, the white one being strapped to a clogged bracket, the red one spinning on the torque engine, the blue one held in place by rubber frets, and the black one chiming against the aluminium knob on the wicket, which is fastened to the anchorage unit by a system of winches controlled by a clay handle on the bole, against which pellets are fired at pre-arranged intervals by the steam gun just below the fourth set of nozzles, cleverly positioned at such a distance from the first three sets to provide a constant stream of gases to pass over the tarpaulin, in which punctures have been made to allow ease of passage for the andiron tubes carrying ballbearings to the spandrel and thus on to the rotating wooden platform, upon which the greased hinges chafe against the pulleys sufficiently for the sparks to ignite sulphur bombs inside the bakelite carriage, without endangering the pads, bulbs and chocks on the hooter, at the sounding of which the intricately-wired snares snap shut and entrap the oiled plasticine clumps, thus momentarily halting the recurrent biting movements of the cogs on the discus, throwing shards of todge into the motor around which you will have placed canvas bags packed with candles in order to steady the persistent rattling of the ticker on the back of the iron sledge underneath the trolley carrying the double battery-powered hammer which serves to agitate the drum containing the four-inch blades detached from the rusted bowl of the compass, held in place on the rocket by a monstrous titanium screw wedged against the plackets of the grit distributor, customised by locking its gut probes into position with no less than twenty six separate multiple-gate plugs, on each of which a scorched zinc disc swivels in response to the magnetic properties of the special basin receiving the droplets of highly acidic gum arabic spilling out of the glass globe tethered to the scalding hot clasps of the larger plate by chains which run parallel to the lengths of string tied at one end to the pirate's aureole and at the other to the shank of the casket nailed to the box of flags stolen from the same warehouse which provided the hooks for the plank balanced uneasily across the gap between the pinboard and the hodometer fitted with small beeswax parcels lashed to the crane from which dangle several springs and coils loaded with lead weights and enamelled cubes the purpose of which becomes apparent when the gleaming cork is plunged into the canister of boiling duckpond water kept at constant temperature by hastily-repaired piping fed by siphons and buttressed by giant prongs from the surfaces of which have been expunged precisely engraved instructions for the use of the inspirational choir funnels hidden inside the derrick next to the pumps on the tray of bauxite pebbles wrapped in hideous orange taffeta swaddling material as a sop to the git who provided the jars, flakes and asbestos-free wing cranks you will require for timing the bleaching operation on the plastic squirting mechanism moulded out of discarded beetle caps salvaged from a manufacturer of resins whose grotesque sponge hood has been incorporated into the workings of the shiny magnesium tripod atop which lurks a uranium pill squashed underneath a varnished Icelandic pan containing phosphorus hoops and a glamorous leather trumpet pitched towards a cobalt beaker lit up by the Mackenzie Beam angled obliquely next to a yellow fustian canopy covering a massive trellis to which are glued an up-ended cone of polythene veiled by cotton-wool wrapped around a toy horse with a propeller caked in mercury powering the fulcrum and bails on the fractured tub countersunk behind the crust of a feather on a stool with pins affixed to the leaching grille placed askew atop the big cracked bucket of winnowed sand. Now stand back and count to a hundred. You will have forgotten all about juggling.
Reader Judith Winch writes :
Mr Key : I discovered your site while searching for Xavier Cugat - it seems your so-called “search engine lure” works - and I have become a regular visitor. Since the new year I have looked forward to “calling in” at Hooting Yard on Sunday evenings to see what new material has been added over the past seven days. I particularly like the “Decoy Duck of the Week” feature, and am irritated that the name is a misnomer, as some weeks go by with no sign of a decoy duck at all. Please rectify this situation, or you risk losing a reader who might otherwise be described as “devoted (possibly)”.
I am happy to oblige!
“Goe plow in the stubble for now is the season For sowing of fitches, of beanes, and of peason. Sow runciuals timely, and all that be gray, But sow not the white, till St. Gregorie's day” — Thomas Tusser
Ingredients : 6 oz self-raising flour, 6 oz self-hatred flour, 4 tbsp Jezebel oil, 25 pints boiled duckpond water, 1 raisin, 12 quail's eggs, a smidgeon of marzipan, 12 cucumbers, 13 sticks rhubarb, a very large hollyhock, 2 buckets chaff, 1 pint turtle's blood, 5 pkts Special K®, 15 blood oranges, 2 fresh bream*, 54 more raisins, 1 plastic bag, 8 radishes, 1 cup blé, 18 pints milk, 3 lb toffee, 5 tbsp gum arabic, 2 cups Bathsheba extract, 62 moorhen feathers, dash of isinglass, 1 tbsp lemon curd, 3 balls wool, 5 oz. titanium, 1 beetle, 8 jars nameless, eldritch plasma.
Method : 1. Find a large metal drum, about the size of a telephone kiosk. 2. Shove everything into it, having chopped up the things that need chopping. 3. Boil. 4. While it boils, think long and hard about the fact that rhubarb takes its name from the Greek rheon barbaron, that is, something which comes from the barbarous country of the Rha - the Greek name for the Volga. 5. When it has finished boiling, transfer it into a big metal basin and bake it in an oven for four hours. 6. Remove from oven, allow to cool, then cut into cake-size cubes. 7. Fry the cakes over a low flame until golden, or what passes for golden in this leaden age. 8. Serve with milk diluted with tap water.
* NOTE : The bream is the only fish to be named after a major 20th century English lutenist.
My loathing of squirrels is a matter of public record. To my chagrin, less attention has been paid to my admiration of - indeed, devotion to - badgers, despite the fact that for many years I have been a Fledgling Satrap of the Blister Lane Institute of Badger Enthusiasts, and only last week was awarded a small, charming, albeit greasy, tin badge by our esteemed Director. The citation was ill-written and ungrammatical, probably because it was composed, under duress, by my arch-enemy Perkins, of whom more anon.
I recall clearly the most handsome badger I ever clapped eyes upon. It was sitting, or lying, or just generally disporting itself on the garden wall of a neighbour. It was so still that I assumed it was in a badger-like doze. The morning was, after all, grimly hot. I ran into my house (The Dobson Compound) to fetch a camera, intending to take a snapshot to add to my album of over seventeen badger photographs. When I returned, panting, the badger was still still. I approached closer. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the badger was in fact made of plasticine! It had been abandoned by that tiresome variety artiste Edith O'Shaughnessy (see below).
Source : Things Beginning with B, My Hatred of Squirrels, & Hedy Lamarr : Scientist by Dobson (signed, limited edition of 12 pamphlets, spineless, crumpled, out of print).
“You know what a pleasure it is to have a pretty pet Dog. I do not mean those little lap dogs. They are of no use, and when I see a little girl with a lap dog, I always say, “Well, well, that little girl is, and always will be foolish.” And why do I say so? Because I know she will neglect her books and her other duties just to play with Flora. If you want a good pet dog—get a large one. The best dogs are the St. Bernard or Newfoundland. They are very large. They are jet black. They are very intelligent, and after you have had them for some time, you can make them perform many tricks for the amusement of your little friends. The St. Bernard Dog is a native of the Alps. He is named after a convent on Mount St. Bernard in Switzerland. The convent is 8,038 feet above the foot of the mountain. It is a Benedictine monastery and hospital, and is the highest inhabited spot in Europe. Travellers passing the Alps into Italy have to pass over the mountains. They are covered with snow and very dangerous. The good monks go out with their dogs and if they find any traveller benighted or frozen in the snow, they lend him succour and take him to the monastery. The dogs are very strong and can carry a man. They are all good water dogs, and if you were to fall in the water, one of them could hold you up until rescued by your friends. Growler is waiting for his breakfast. He is Eva's pet.” — Uncle Philip, The Girl's Cabinet of Instructive & Moral Stories (1856)
The dilapidated walls, the mouldering plaster, the blackened mantel-pieces, the stained and polluted wainscots - under license of a fop! Wrath, wrath immeasurable, unimaginable, unmitigable, burned at my heart like a cancer; the worst had come, among weeds and forgetfulness, the blank treachery of hollowness. A pageant of vapory exhalations; thick clouds and vapours. Hoist by the fop's petard, I could but drool.
Source : Clapped In Irons, Booed In Zincs - Prose Poems by Gervase Beerpint, edited and annotated by Dobson.
Last week an auction took place in an eerie fishing village somewhere or other. Among all the chandlery and angling equipment, I was astonished to find the single-page manuscript of Lothar Preen's first draft of his song The Consumptive's Vest (pictured above). It was thought to have perished in the infernal conflagration which destroyed the Potato Building in the 1960s. Its discovery will, I am sure, delight Preenites around the globe.
Scholars will note that the words on this first draft bear no relation to the lyric of the final version, which caused such uproar at the 1955 Festival of Argumentative Music in Ülm.
