Botched Trepanning Operations

Yesterday's passing mention of botched trepanning operations prompted Pansy Cradledew to remind me of the account given by Nestingbird in his Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Dobson But Were Afraid To Ask. I am pleased to reprint it here:

For about a week, Dobson had been jabbering to anyone who would listen that he was determined to have a hole drilled in his skull. He had been impressed by the sixties songstress Julie Felix, and convinced himself that if he, too, had his cranium punctured, he may be able to resume his abortive musical career. In spite of the loud groaning of his friends, Dobson bought a ukulele and sat listening repeatedly to Julie Felix's recording of The Great Brain Robbery, trying hopelessly to learn the chords.

Thursday came, a day of incomprehensible weather and newspaper headlines about a previously unknown strain of potato blight. Dobson slipped out of the house before breakfast, returned his library books, and caught a train to Mustard Parva, where, having located the high street, he rapped upon the door of Dr Stanley Hinge.

“I want you to drill a hole in my skull!” shouted Dobson, overenthusiastically, brandishing a drill-bit in the face of the bewildered medico. The pamphleteer wrongly believed that Dr Hinge was the local secretary of the Julie Felix Fan Club and would therefore be sympathetic. Alas, he had got the wrong man.

What happened next was so appalling that I cannot bring myself to describe it to the delicate readers of Hooting Yard. Suffice to say that Dobson emerged from Dr Hinge's surgery three hours later, bloodied and bandaged, with no less than fourteen dents in his head. Dents, but no holes. Suffering from temporary amnesia as a result of the doctor's cack-handed attentions, Dobson spent the next three months wandering aimlessly around some hideous rural backwater, living off berries and canal water, sleeping in various noisome barnyards and talking to cows.

Bixby's Mucilage

Another thing that was mentioned yesterday - in the quotation from Mr Bangs - was a phosphorescent mucilage bottle. This important item of stationery is never far from my thoughts, nor should it be from yours. I am uncertain as to the phosphorescent quality of Bixby's mucilage - if indeed it is luminous at all - but of course there is nothing to stop you customising it. Given a lick of luminous paint, this splendid item would lend a certain dash to the meanest escritoire.

Oh, that reminds me. We have a souvenir bottle of Ayn Rand “Fountainhead” Mucilage to give away. Just answer the following question, and the first correct answer received will win. Bear in mind that it will hardly be our fault if the bottle gets lost in the post.

If a flap is protruding from a spindle in the headquarters of a deranged criminal mastermind, why can you hear the faint sound of a plunging dirigible?

America

Looking through my diaries, I am reminded that on the very same day as Dobson's disastrous attempt at trepanation, I set off a-roaming. I left my ruined chalet at about the same time as Dobson caught his train. On the first part of the journey - mine, not Dobson's - I was looking at all the life. There were plants and birds and rocks and things, things I was unable to identify, despite having a handy illustrated encyclopaedia in my knapsack. There was sand and hills and rings, abandoned engagement rings, tossed aside in what one must assume were fits of pique. It puzzled me that no one had returned to reclaim them. On I went. Dobson's train was pulling in to Mustard Parva station when the solitude of my journey was at last broken. The first thing I met was a fly with a buzz, and the second thing was a distressed monitor lizard. I fed the fly to the lizard, had a snack myself, and pressed on. Eventually I came to a clump of pugton trees, and I examined them very carefully, and the sand, and the sky with no clouds. The heat was hot and the ground was dry but the air was full of sound. I could have sworn I heard a Bavarian accordion band, but it must have been my imagination. I've been through the desert on a horse with no name. It felt good to be out of the rain. In the desert you can remember your name, 'cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain. Even so, I wish now that I had been with Dobson on his train.

Garb of the Potus

Yesterday we published a picture of Ivan The Terrible, in an item about Tsars, and it led me to reflect on the manner in which potentates of old used to dress up to the nines. You knew you were dealing with an emperor or a grand vizier, because they were festooned in finery, while you were just a snivelling peasant in rags. Nowadays, of course, the powerful like to pretend that they are just like us, and dress more or less accordingly. Look at a group of world leaders - who, when gathered, always seem to be photographed standing on the steps of an imposing building - and you will see an array of extremely dull business suits. It may as well be a convention of accountants. Good news, then, from Boston, where wannabe Potus John Kerry announced that, if elected, he will make all his public appearances in a special Potus-suit.

International Bog Day

According to the superb wikipedia, tomorrow is International Bog Day, a time for all of us to sing the praises of sphagnum. I am distraught to note that for once the wiki is wrong, as the celebration came five days early this year. However, one sure way to recover from such a trauma is to ponder all the other special days or weeks that are celebrated around the world. I am particularly fond of “Awareness Weeks”, those times when we are urged to raise our consciousness about - usually - health-related matters. But why should nosebleeds, coughing fits, running sores and botched trepanning operations get all the attention? It's time to broaden the range. I therefore propose that next week should become Potato Awareness Week, with Wednesday as International Pencil Sharpener Day. Before introducing an exciting new calendar, however, I ought to check up on what already exists. I am sure there must be a website somewhere giving comprehensive details of all these things, but I haven't found it. If any reader can help, please send details of useful links.

Tsars

Go ahead and accuse me of jumping on the bandwagon, but I think it is time we appointed a Hooting Yard Tsar. There was a time when there was only one Tsar, the Tsar of All the Russias, but the Bolshevik Revolution put paid to him. (Pedants will argue that early 20th century Bulgaria also had a Tsar, but let that pass.) Now there seem to be so many Tsars about that I probably pass one on the street every day. There is a Drugs Tsar, a Railways Tsar, a Homelessness Tsar, a Smoking Tsar, and who knows how many others. And that's only in the UK. Over in the US, where the Tsar made his comeback, the 9/11 Commission has just recommended the appointment of an Intelligence Tsar.

British readers will recall that John Major, the last Conservative Prime Minister, had a bee in his bonnet about traffic cones, for some reason, and set up a spectacularly important-sounding Cones Hotline to tackle the “problem”. His government collapsed and the Conservative Party is still falling apart nearly a decade later. A hotline was clearly not the answer. If Major had created a Cones Tsar, he would probably still be in power.

If you think you have the qualifications to become the Hooting Yard Tsar, send in a full letter of application, headed I Want To Be A Tsar, to our special Tsars R Us Department. Below is a picture of what Tsars generally look like, but don't worry if you bear no resemblance to Ivan The Terrible (for it is he). We won't take that into account.

Massacre of the Innocents at Hoon

Splattered with seagull droppings, the Woman of Twigs stood at the very edge of the cliff, her back to the sea. Barefoot, she rocked gently back and forth on her impromptu podium. The villagers were gathered about her, wretched and snivelling. Some carried pitchforks, or dainty little tin boxes full of bip. They were all ears as they waited for the Woman of Twigs to speak. She had blindfolded herself with a threadbare bandage, bound her hair into tufts with flaxen yarn and roots, and held in her hands a ribbon of bloody silk. Precisely at the moment that the thousandth wave of the day crashed against the rocks below, the Woman of Twigs ceased her rocking, cast the ribbon to the winds, and, shouting to make herself heard over the screeching gulls, began:

“You asked me to save the village from Doom. I have communed with a variety of weird and tiresome shades to seek guidance. You are correct, your village is imperilled. There is only one way to rescue it from the coming agony. Three of your number must travel many miles distant, to the town of Hoon. There, they must find a churn, possibly broken, the churn of Hoon, which has had engraved upon it a rather fetching likeness of myself. Do not ask why. Having scoured Hoon for this churn, and found in Hoon this churn of Hoon, it must be brought back here, with due haste, and hurled into the boiling sea from this very spot on the cliff's edge. That task complete, your village will once again know glee. I have left unmentioned one crucial point. The three who will venture to Hoon, there to find and return the Hoon-churn, must all be called Ned. That is all.”

Work began at once on building the chariot. In the kitchens, the villagers boiled up huge iron pans full of mud and silt dredged from the riverbed. Trees were felled in the spinney. The smithy at his anvil beat out a goodly number of nails, spikes, and very sharp hooks. Within a week, the foul-smelling but indestructible vehicle was ready. Volunteers fanned out across the countryside to trap a suitable beast of burden. Horses, oxen, even a crippled reindeer of great elegance, were sighted and stalked, but another week elapsed without success. Eventually it was decided that the three Neds would have to travel under their own steam, pulling the chariot by themselves. Ned, Ned and Ned agreed, drooling with excitement in their eagerness to set out on so glorious a journey, one that would save the village and bring them renown.

They left the village at a gallop, in the middle of the night. Without maps, they relied entirely on local lore and superstition. From infancy, each Ned had been imbued with a long catechism of saws and proverbs. Now, each had engraved upon his skull a different couplet, handed down through the generations:

If you wish to go to Hoon / Spit three times and follow the moon

Hoon's beyond yon crumpled hedge / Hemmed around by gorse and sedge

When you see eight pebbles strewn / You're eight days and nights from Hoon

They travelled without pause, two dragging the stinking chariot while the third lay bundled in it, sleeping or feeding from a polythene bag full of curdled slops. At first they followed the course of the Great Frightening River, until suddenly it wormed its way underground. For eighteen months they travelled through a desolate landscape, flat, grey, and curiously redolent of shurd. But as they entered Hoon's hinterland, things changed. In rapid succession, they passed an asbestos works, a barrel of rainwater, a customs post, damp hectares, elk encampments, fenceposts, grotesque wooden carvings, horrifying shrubbery, improbable water tables, jerrybuilt huts, a kaolin quarry, lumps of disgust, monstrous gulches, nebulous stretches of pointed brambly things, ornithologists' hideaways, parakeet enclosures, quarantine sheds, rusk markets, strange gobbets of sludge, a tremendous farmyard, urn burials, a vacuum, wrestling pythons, extravagant banks of yellow fog, yeast traffickers, and a zither-crushing factory. Ned said to Ned and Ned, “Soon we shall be in Hoon. I can feel it in my water.” He was not mistaken.

The great South Gate of Hoon was over a thousand years old, and completely overgrown by clumps of hideous, fleshy foliage oozing poisonous sap. All attempts to destroy this abominable vegetation had met with failure, and it had not been possible to open the gate for at least two centuries. Rather than blasting a hole in the town wall, a ramshackle lift contraption was knocked up close by. Two wooden platforms, one either side of the great wall, were raised and lowered by an exciting system of pistons, pulleys and winches operated by a team of gate-keepers wearing boa constrictor masks. In return for their labours, they exacted a hefty price; unfortunately the three Neds were utterly penniless. Muttering among themselves, our heroic trio decided to proffer gifts in lieu of payment. Ned offered the gate-keepers his cap, which was made of rusted whisks. Ned presented them with a sick toad he had been pampering for the past month. Ned gave them a handful of silt scraped from the underside of the chariot. Well pleased with these gifts, the gate-keepers allowed the exhausted threesome to clamber onto the platform.

Two days later, the three Neds were lowered to the ground on the other side of the wall. At last they were in Hoon! Finding the possibly broken churn of Hoon could only be a matter of time. They would be implacable, ferreting into every corner of the ancient town. As soon as they disembarked from the wooden platform, however, they were set upon by a whirling tangle of ruffians who bashed them senseless, stole the shirts off their backs, emptied their polythene bags of slops into the gutter, wholly dismantled the chariot, had at them with ferocious scimitars, and left them for dead. And indeed, Ned and Ned were dead. Ned was carted off by a passing stretcher patrol, but panted his last breath an hour later, by which time the ruffians had scampered away, heading for the mountains. They stopped by the kaolin quarry to eat their packed lunches, and then, as night came down, they strode up the mountainside, these ruffians, their gazes fixed on the sky above, to look at the numberless stars, to view the boundless firmament.

Grabber's Deckchair

There is a woodworm-riddled frame of a deckchair on show in the Museum at Ack-on-the-Vug. It was donated by the talented Bolivian water polo ace Rodrigo Grabber. The canvas of the chair has long since rotted away, and such is the fragility of the wood that the exhibit is kept in a special air-tight cabinet, into which fumous preserving substances are pumped through a cleverly-designed valve-and-nozzle affair reputedly constructed by Grabber himself.

Grabber is a fascinating figure, best described by Maud Pastry in her seminal Children's Illustrated History Of Bolivian Water Polo, the fourth edition of which has recently been published. Pastry states that Grabber is “diminutive, arch, lewd, hirsute, prone to fits, and often covered in breadcrumbs, but only when he is on dry land; for once he enters the water, he comes into his element, and not even the greatest of poets could find words to describe the grace and exuberance of his water polo playing - not Dante, not Donne, not Chumpot”.

This is all tosh, of course, but has long interested scholars who have attempted to identify Pastry's last-named great poet, of whom nothing is known. Grabber himself - elfin and preening - was so intrigued by the reference that he missed the quarter final of the All Bolivia Water Polo Championship Tournament Play-off in 1954. And why? Because on the afternoon of that important match, Grabber was searching through dusty tomes in the basement of the bibliotheque, seeking information on Chumpot - but to no avail. To this day, the existence of the poet has not been confirmed. Some hold that Pastry (or someone on her team of forty editorial assistants) misspelled the name. Piv has compiled a list of alternative spellings for consideration - among them Shampong, Thumpboot and Cargpan - but this is probably a red herring. Of more worth, perhaps, is the present international attempt to gain access to the Pastry archives, wherein lies the manuscript of her book. The Archives are housed in a lead-lined sealed cabin at the bottom of a gaping pit dug into a blizzard-racked swathe of Antarctic nothingness. Once the expedition party has located the pit, it will only be a matter of time before the manuscript is recovered, and a solution to the Chumpot mystery found at last!

Museum records do not indicate why Grabber donated this rotting deckchair. Legend has it that the chair (when intact) was used by Grabber's mother during her days on the Central Helsinki Pipistrelle Bats For Orphans Committee.

The Dictionary of Stains

The majestic eight-volume Dictionary of Stains by Walter Mad is mentioned in our thrilling postage-stamp mystery serial Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, chapter six of which appears today. The Dictionary is extremely hard to track down today, even from the most assiduous antiquarian book dealer, although a copy of volume four was recently sold on eBay for an unimaginable sum. As a sop to readers gnashing their teeth in frustration that they cannot read this great work in full, here are a couple of pictures of stains:

Some Questions About Gilead

Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Is the chemist's shop shut? Has the clinic been boarded up? Why does the Ambulance of Gilead sit rusted in a locked and bolted garage, its siren broken and its tyres punctured flat? What happened to all that balm anyway? Was it stolen by a ruthless gang of aromatic resin smugglers? Did the gang abduct the physician as part of the plan? Was the local television station prompted to show Celebrity Balm In Gilead Sniffer Dog Challenge? Did the massed bloodhounds and their permatanned owners fail to find even the merest trace of resin? Did the gang succeed in carting off all the balm in Gilead to their mountain lair? What are we to make of the conjecture in the press that the physician's abduction was a piece of fakery and that he was the mastermind behind the plot? How long did it take for a hack on the Daily Shackle to dub the affair Balmingileadgate? Will there ever again be balm in Gilead? Who is the young whippersnapper who has arrived, announcing himself as the replacement physician? Is there something reproachful and oily about his manner? Why does he keep referring to the missing balm as “gumme” or “triacle”? Is he unable to spell “treacle”, or is he up to something? Why does he refuse to divulge the recipe for the bandage paste he uses? Is he in league with his predecessor, and with his predecessor's alleged gang? Is there any connection between the fact that the new oily physician has put posters up all over the place promising to rid the populace of “evil humours” and that “malign bile ad” is an anagram of “balm in Gilead”? What on earth is that stuff the new physician smears on his hair? Must it pong so offensively? Has he no shame? If you know the answers to any of these questions, or can assist the Gilead medical authorities in any way, please write to the Balm In Gilead Appeal c/o Detective Captain Unstrebnodtalb.

Neptune

Today is Neptunalia, the day when the ancient Romans honoured the god of the seas (and water in general), seen here looking suitably godlike. The statue is by Jacopo Sansovino (1486-1570), who was also known as Jacopo Tatti. Should you wish to ape an ancient Roman and celebrate the day, here's what to do: go out to a field and build yourself a little hut out of laurel branches. This is your umbra. Take a picnic, and make sure you drink mineral water. You can carry on picnicking and generally larking about until tomorrow. You may also wish to sacrifice a bull, or begin doing some irrigation work. Oh, and if you have a horse, try to get it to pay some sort of obeisance to Neptune. Apparently, he invented horses.

Then the Boisterous Man

First there was a flask of tea to be screwed shut, and cloud-patterns to be analysed, with the aid of diagrams drawn on clear plastic, from a pile kept in a locker by the boiler room, which was always locked, even on Thursdays, when inspectors came, three of them, driving up in a sort of van that looked like it had been built behind the Iron Curtain during the 1950s but was, remarkably, almost brand new, as you could learn if you took a close look at it once it had been parked, rather sloppily, next to that incredible cedar tree on the branches of which dozens upon dozens of birds perched, let us not catalogue the birds, there is not time enough for that, except to remark that the tree was innocent of owls, and always had been, for reasons known only to ornithologists, particularly the resident ornithologist, that insouciant man who always wore velvet, there was talk that his only inheritance when his parents perished in a funicular railway accident in some distant mountain range or other was a bolt of mauve crushed velvet, but I don't know the truth of that, I don't know the truth of anything, I don't even know what time it is, I haven't slept for a week, I lie awake all night terrified of my familiar, the tiny invisible goblin that scampers around my room and gnaws at the curtains and the wainscot. First there was a flask of tea to be screwed shut, and then the boisterous man went paddling in a fresh puddle, having kicked off his big boots and hung his socks on a fence. Well, I was that boisterous man. I was a happy splasher, until my invisible goblin came to stay.

The Ubiquity of Dobson

A Google search for Dobson yields no less than 1,150,000 results. Of course, a handful of these purport to be about other Dobsons, rather than the out-of-print pamphleteer himself. Having examined all the pages with a fine tooth comb, I am breathless in my admiration for Dobson's skills as a master of disguise. He has somehow managed to continue his subterfuge from beyond the grave, which is some feat, as I am sure you can appreciate. But it was ever thus. Four days after his death, a balaclava-clad farmyard person swore an affidavit before a provincial solicitor that he had seen Dobson squatting behind his pig hut, scribbling notes into a ledger, but that when he - the farmyard person - returned with cronies, to accost the wraith, “Dobson”, if it was he, had vanished, leaving only a toothpaste tube from which much of the paste had already been eked, and a sinister plasticine duck, possibly intended to be a bufflehead, the head of which was squashed by the farmyard person's mastiff, by accident. Was it Dobson? Probably not, but who can say for certain?

Inspired by the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, whose aim is to “name at least one notable public landmark in each [US] state and all 3,067 counties after the 40th president [i.e., the Potus]”, Hooting Yard is setting up the Dobson Legacy Project. No city, town, village, hamlet, or cluster of shabby rural buildings ought to be without its very own Dobson Boulevard. I implore all readers to fire off a letter to their local bureaucrat this very minute!

S & N

I have always thought it a pity that -s supplanted -n (or -en) as the standard plural form in English. There are a few surviving words (children, brethren, oxen) but -s won the day. Yet isn't it somehow more enticing to put on your shoon, rather than your shoes? Or, when taking a nap, to have forty winken? Reviving this old form is simply a matter of will and practice. If we all start saying piggen and flasken and heronen and TV chatshow hosten, between us we can slowly but surely change the language.

While we are on the subject of collective action, something must be done, as a matter of urgency, about the blight of mobile phone ringtones. Here's the plan. Go to this article from the Guardian, print it out, and make multiple photocopies to carry with you at all times. Then, every time your life is made that little bit less bearable by the distressing sound of a mobile phone bleeping out some hideous noise, thrust a copy into the offender's hand. Do not be shy. Take action!

Morning Has Broken

Like the first morning. Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird. Another thing that has broken is the hedge of the hoyden in my bailiwick. Her hedge has been threatened before, for her neighbours have evil designs and they are all bent out of shape, as morals go. Late at night, these neighbours sit in darkness plotting against the hoyden. They draw charts. They make lists. Their eyes are glued to their fishtank in which brightly-coloured tropical finned things swim about listlessly in water. Her neighbours have taken against the hoyden and have determined to break her hedge. They use a saw and chisels and secateurs and other metal things and they wait for her to go about her hoydenish business one wet Friday morning, and then they pounce upon her hedge, and they destroy it in half an hour. The blackbird, the blackbird that spoke earlier, the one that used to sit atop the hoyden's hedge and sing its little palpitating heart out, the blackbird has flown away now, like the first bird. It has taken wing and flown so far away that the hoyden will never see it again. What she will see is her broken hedge, its rack and ruin. And she will break down in tears on her doorstep, her doorstep in my bailiwick, and she will weep not knowing that her neighbours, that couple to whom she gave a dozen eggs last St Swithin's Day, as a gift, that same couple who seem to her all smiles and chunky cardigans are the false friends with fatal flaws who have broken her hedge. And I too want to weep, for the hoyden and her hedge, and the morning that is broken, and the blackbird that has flown.

An Old Map of Easter Island

Curd

The above quotation from Sabine Baring-Gould describes an insubstantial, phantom figure with a “complexion of curd”. That phrase applies perfectly to the indubitably solid, corporeal person of Dr P V C Pote, the subject of one of Dobson's most inspiring pamphlets. Indeed, Dobson begins with a highly-wrought flight of fancy in which he suggests a number of alternatives for his subject's ever-enigmatic initials, among which is “Pallor Very Curd-like”.

Dr Pote would be forgotten today had he not achieved a kind of immortality via the sixty-page biography in which Dobson's prose achieves an almost hallucinatory opulence. Here is the celebrated passage in which Pote's prowess as a speaker is lauded:

“This pallid man with a complexion of curd held his listeners spellbound as, standing upright in a high wind, he told them of the death of Avicenna, by taking nine clysters together in a fit of the Colick. His audience had no sooner digested this news than the good doctor moved on, informing them that all the air beyond Thule is thick, condensed and jellied, looking just like sea lungs. They badgered him with questions, all of which he answered with good grace, and no little humour, before describing to them a snow piece, of land and trees covered with snow and ice, and mountains of ice floating in the sea, with bears, seals, foxes, and variety of rare fowls upon them, then explaining the priests' curing of mad dogs by burning them in the forehead with Saint Bellin's Key, before describing the quite unrelated matter of a noble Quandros or stone taken out of a vulture's head. Brains bedizened by the doctor's magpie mind, his listeners were near replete, yet he had one more topic for them, ending his lecture with a twenty-minute anecdote of bewildering complexity about a glass of spirits made of aethereal salt, hermetically sealed up, kept continually in quicksilver; of so volatile a nature that it will scarce endure the light, and therefore only to be shown in winter, or by the light of a carbuncle, or Bononian stone. And then he was done, and he pulled his black cape about his shoulders, and swept away, into the wind, implacable and majestic, of the finest fibre from which a man can be hewn, notwithstanding a pallor of curd.”

Some Buttons

The Ascent of the Mountain at Hoon

There were four hundred of us. Lars carried the water in a shallow basin, spilling a small amount of our vital supply each time he stumbled over concealed heaps of bauxite or other points of geological interest. Helga was able to top up the basin by melting patches of snow with her bunsen burner, but there was very little snow on the lower slopes, and what there was had invariably been shat on by pigs, wildebeeste, geese, and bats. By the second day, Lars had managed not only to spill the entire water supply, but had also cracked the basin in half by accidentally bashing it against a rogue shard of basalt. The rest of us were furious. Venables wanted to hurl Lars over a precipice. Van Gob brandished his rifle with menace, muttering threats. Lars merely sulked, squatting in the bracken and whittling away at a small piece of wood he had painted crimson some years earlier. The tension mounted.

Then Horst discovered some strange blueish flecks in a piece of rock. Gritting his teeth, he set about it with his iron hammers, and we were astonished to watch incandescent liquid spurt forth, forming a bright arc over the ramshackle encampment of pitched tents we called home. Glubb was the first to drink the liquid, for his thirst was the stuff of legend. He collected some in a battered tin cup and swallowed it at a gulp. Moments later, just as we were lighting a bonfire, his eyes glazed over and he stamped his feet in a demented rhythm. He began to declaim, slowly, in a booming voice quite unlike his usual prissy prating. He said:

“I have seen red shelves stacked with a thousand corks. The corks have teeth-marks in them, as if they have been gnawed, by a billy-goat or other beast of the field. Then, and only then, a vision of mud. I have listened to the sound made by chaffinches, and walked a hundred miles in driving rain, burning clay until it explodes, tying endless knots in brown canvas flags. My breath is the breath of a man who has the gift of tongues, a man who has spoken with corncrakes. Gemstones have I for ears, and putty for a hat. Wrap me in chrysanthemums, inveigle me with truncated proverbs - I shall not hear, for I hear only the clanking of broken churchbells set swinging high in towers when the air is still and the sky has vanished. I say to you that I am as of Ack, that which has a light known not unto you. Nor shall it ever be known unto you, for yours are the eyes and ears of pebbles lying scattered on the floor of the vasty deep. I have lavished you with ice and wood and Ack, and now I must begone from your sight. Farewell.”

So saying, Glubb marched away, uphill, towards the summit. He did not look back. We never saw him again.

The next morning, Lars was detailed to return to the sordid village at the foot of the mountain to get a new supply of water and a new basin in which to carry it. Lip's attempt to glue the cracked basin back into one piece had failed, because the paste he used was contaminated. Waving farewell to Lars, and leaving Lip to catch up with us after extricating his arm from a narrow vertical crevice in the mountainside, we pressed on. Brabant took snapshots along various stages of the climb. There was a particularly good one of Helga making final adjustments to her snorkelling gear before diving to the bottom of the Imaginary Lake At The Mountain At Hoon, which has enticed so many earlier pilgrims on this route. Brabant himself was heroic, urging us onward whenever we became disconsolate or morose. He handed out his special biscuits, which tasted of bones, but were as nutritious as pemmican. On the eighth day, while everyone else was asleep, Brabant shaved off his massive walrus moustache. When we awoke, not one of us recognised him. Charming japes like this kept our spirits up.

It was on the eleventh day that we became worried about Lars, who had still not rejoined the party. Venables, Piccolo and Chasuble volunteered to go back in search of him. Before they left, Father Todge offered Mass. Just as Lip was about to take the communion wafer, we were distracted by a thunderclap, and the rains began. We sheltered under a limestone outcrop that seemed terribly crumbly. Van Gob did sterling work shoring it up with some of the zinc and titanium rods which he carried in his knapsack for such an emergency. The only sour note that day occurred when Dennis, spotting a lame horse through his tin telescope, witlessly left the shelter in order to parley with it. He was struck by lightning and incinerated. The horse whinnied and limped away.

Some days later, the rains stopped at last. Delaying only to bury what was left of Dennis, we made rapid progress towards the summit. Jean-Pierre and Istvana carried my wheelchair over ravines and gullies, at the bottom of one of which I noticed a huge pile of cutlery. It was perplexingly free of rust.

As we climbed higher, a yellow foul-smelling mist descended. On the fortieth day, Annette's flask disappeared in a puff of roseate vapour. Brabant's head took on the appearance of a turnip. It was he who announced that we had not brought enough oxygen tents. I began to knit furiously, doling out scarves, balaclavas, and woolly leggings to the company as fast as I was able. But we all realised things could not continue for much longer. When we estimated that we were four days' climb from the summit, we gathered in Strob's big tent for a meeting. Tempers were frayed, and Minnie's attempts to jolly us along by singing selections from Ezra Pound's Cowboy Songbook met only with hissing. We chewed what was left of the pickle supply and tried to iron out a strategy. After some aimless discussions, Venables announced that he had carried out an inventory. His eyes gleamed dangerously as he said:

“I have divided the inventory into three distinct categories, as follows. Category A, supplies we have exhausted; category B, supplies which we will exhaust within the next eighteen hours; and category C, supplies of which we have a huge and unwarrantable surplus. My inventory gives the following results: A - asbestos, bails, crimping irons, doilies, electric shoes, febrifuge, grey bags, and harpoonery; B - ip, jumble, kohl and largesse; C - muck, nose cones, operating tables, polevaulting equipment, querns, rosary beads, starch, talc, urns, varnish, whisks, expropriated jam, yashmaks and zobb. Hmm. You all look rather surprised. I don't blame you. We have not been sensible of our peril. We cannot -”

He was interrupted by a commotion at the entrance flap. We all looked round, and were startled to see Lars, heavily bearded, broken sunglasses hanging off one ear, struggling into the tent. He was carrying a giant bolt of sailcloth which appeared to be threaded with gold. Ashen-faced, Lars lurched to the podium and began to speak. We could hardly hear him, for he was close to death, and his words were mere gasps. It was only later I realised that he was revealing to us the knowledge he had kept hidden all along, thus consigning us to an icy fate on this terrible mountain. Why had he not told us before? As it was, none of us caught his meaning at the time. We heard only incoherent wheezing, which we dismissed as the raving of a dying imbecile.

We buried Lars in a shallow grave and proceeded to unroll the sailcloth. The thread was indeed spun of gold, but if the cloth had any significance it was not apparent. Using Helga's cutlass, we cut it into sections to make hoods, blankets, bandages, and tourniquets. The next day, before we continued boldly on, Curwen challenged Horst to a wrestling match. The two of them had been arguing for days, following a brouhaha over the pitons. We formed a circle around

[The manuscript breaks off at this point. We are indebted to Waldemar Ng for this translation from the Hungarian. Unlike earlier translators, Ng had access to the actual woodblocks on which the narrator carved his journal. It is now over forty years since they were discovered, wedged in a crevasse halfway up the mountain at Hoon. Did the expedition reach the summit before they vanished without trace? We shall never know. The woodblocks, incidentally, are housed in the Museum at Ack-on-the-Vug, where they are guarded by a surly curator named Mungo. Gifts of raw meat and insect repellent are likely to melt Mungo's cold black heart, should one wish to examine the woodblocks at leisure.]

Stalking a Toad-headed Robber

The stalking of a robber with the head of a toad is one of twenty six items in a biographical index to the life of the criminal mastermind Walter Mad. The full index can be read in Chapter Five of Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, the latest episode in our thrilling weekly serial. It is curious that Dobson never turned his attention to Walter Mad, for he was fascinated by despicable malefactors of every stripe. He wrote percipiently about the so-called Irksome Poisoner of Cupflop, the Hungarian maniac Borag Lacko, and Blasphemous Ted Cargpan, among others, yet the indefatigable pamphleteer seems to have overlooked the madman once described as “the Steed Malbranque of Crime”, in reference to the evocatively-named football player. An annotated anthology of Dobson's writings on very, very bad people is currently in preparation.

Pontiff Mnemonic

How vexing it is to be accosted by somebody who yells, “You there! Name all the Popes in order of their reign, beginning with the first and ending with the current incumbent!” As part of our tireless campaign to inform, elucidate, entertain, and generally make life less baffling, Hooting Yard is pleased to provide a handy mnemonic.Next time you're asked for a list of Pontiffs, you won't be stuck for an answer. First then, those Popes:

Peter (32-67), Linus (67-76), Anacletus (76-88), Clement I (88-97), Evaristus (97-105), Alexander I (105-115), Sixtus I (115-125), Telesphorus (125-136), Hyginus (136-140), Pius I (140-155), Anicetus (155-166), Soter (166-175), Eleutherius (175-189), Victor I (189-199), Zephyrinus (199-217), Callistus I (217-22), Urban I (222-30), Pontain (230-35), Anterus (235-36), Fabian (236-50), Cornelius (251-53), Lucius I (253-54), Stephen I (254-257), Sixtus II (257-258), Dionysius (260-268), Felix I (269-274), Eutychian (275-283), Caius (283-296), Marcellinus (296-304), Marcellus I (308-309), Eusebius (309 or 310), Miltiades (311-14), Sylvester I (314-35), Marcus (336), Julius I (337-52), Liberius (352-66), Damasus I (366-83), Siricius (384-99), Anastasius I (399-401), Innocent I (401-17), Zosimus (417-18), Boniface I (418-22), Celestine I (422-32), Sixtus III (432-40), Leo I (the Great) (440-61), Hilarius (461-68), Simplicius (468-83), Felix III (II) (483-92), Gelasius I (492-96), Anastasius II (496-98), Symmachus (498-514), Hormisdas (514-23), John I (523-26), Felix IV (III) (526-30), Boniface II (530-32), John II (533-35), Agapetus I (535-36), Silverius (536-37), Vigilius (537-55), Pelagius I (556-61), John III (561-74), Benedict I (575-79), Pelagius II (579-90), Gregory I (the Great) (590-604), Sabinian (604-606), Boniface III (607), Boniface IV (608-15), Deusdedit (Adeodatus I) (615-18), Boniface V (619-25), Honorius I (625-38), Severinus (640), John IV (640-42), Theodore I (642-49), Martin I (649-55), Eugene I (655-57), Vitalian (657-72), Adeodatus (II) (672-76), Donus (676-78), Agatho (678-81), Leo II (682-83), Benedict II (684-85), John V (685-86), Conon (686-87), Sergius I (687-701), John VI (701-05), John VII (705-07), Sisinnius (708), Constantine (708-15), Gregory II (715-31), Gregory III (731-41), Zachary (741-52), Stephen II (752), Stephen III (752-57), Paul I (757-67), Stephen IV (767-72), Adrian I (772-95), Leo III (795-816), Stephen V (816-17), Paschal I (817-24), Eugene II (824-27), Valentine (827), Gregory IV (827-44), Sergius II (844-47), Leo IV (847-55), Benedict III (855-58), Nicholas I (the Great) (858-67), Adrian II (867-72), John VIII (872-82), Marinus I (882-84), Adrian III (884-85), Stephen VI (885-91), Formosus (891-96), Boniface VI (896), Stephen VII (896-97), Romanus (897), Theodore II (897), John IX (898-900), Benedict IV (900-03), Leo V (903), Sergius III (904-11), Anastasius III (911-13), Lando (913-14), John X (914-28), Leo VI (928), Stephen VIII (929-31), John XI (931-35), Leo VII (936-39), Stephen IX (939-42), Marinus II (942-46), Agapetus II (946-55), John XII (955-63), Leo VIII (963-64), Benedict V (964), John XIII (965-72), Benedict VI (973-74), Benedict VII (974-83), John XIV (983-84), John XV (985-96), Gregory V (996-99), Sylvester II (999-1003), John XVII (1003), John XVIII (1003-09), Sergius IV (1009-12), Benedict VIII (1012-24), John XIX (1024-32), Benedict IX (1032-45), Sylvester III (1045), Benedict IX (1045), Gregory VI (1045-46), Clement II (1046-47), Benedict IX (1047-48), Damasus II (1048), Leo IX (1049-54), Victor II (1055-57), Stephen X (1057-58), Nicholas II (1058-61), Alexander II (1061-73), Gregory VII (1073-85), Victor III (1086-87), Urban II (1088-99), Paschal II (1099-1118), Gelasius II (1118-19), Callistus II (1119-24), Honorius II (1124-30), Innocent II (1130-43), Celestine II (1143-44), Lucius II (1144-45), Eugene III (1145-53), Anastasius IV (1153-54), Adrian IV (1154-59), Alexander III (1159-81), Lucius III (1181-85), Urban III (1185-87), Gregory VIII (1187), Clement III (1187-91), Celestine III (1191-98), Innocent III (1198-1216), Honorius III (1216-27), Gregory IX (1227-41), Celestine IV (1241), Innocent IV (1243-54), Alexander IV (1254-61), Urban IV (1261-64), Clement IV (1265-68), Gregory X (1271-76), Innocent V (1276), Adrian V (1276), John XXI (1276-77), Nicholas III (1277-80), Martin IV (1281-85), Honorius IV (1285-87), Nicholas IV (1288-92), Celestine V (1294), Boniface VIII (1294-1303), Benedict XI (1303-04), Clement V (1305-14), John XXII (1316-34), Benedict XII (1334-42), Clement VI (1342-52), Innocent VI (1352-62), Urban V (1362-70), Gregory XI (1370-78), Urban VI (1378-89), Boniface IX (1389-1404), Innocent VII (1404-06), Gregory XII (1406-15), Martin V (1417-31), Eugene IV (1431-47), Nicholas V (1447-55), Callistus III (1455-58), Pius II (1458-64), Paul II (1464-71), Sixtus IV (1471-84), Innocent VIII (1484-92), Alexander VI (1492-1503), Pius III (1503), Julius II (1503-13), Leo X (1513-21), Adrian VI (1522-23), Clement VII (1523-34), Paul III (1534-49), Julius III (1550-55), Marcellus II (1555), Paul IV (1555-59), Pius IV (1559-65), Pius V (1566-72), Gregory XIII (1572-85), Sixtus V (1585-90), Urban VII (1590), Gregory XIV (1590-91), Innocent IX (1591), Clement VIII (1592-1605), Leo XI (1605), Paul V (1605-21), Gregory XV (1621-23), Urban VIII (1623-44), Innocent X (1644-55), Alexander VII (1655-67), Clement IX (1667-69), Clement X (1670-76), Innocent XI (1676-89), Alexander VIII (1689-91), Innocent XII (1691-1700), Clement XI (1700-21), Innocent XIII (1721-24), Benedict XIII (1724-30), Clement XII (1730-40), Benedict XIV (1740-58), Clement XIII (1758-69), Clement XIV (1769-74), Pius VI (1775-99), Pius VII (1800-23), Leo XII (1823-29), Pius VIII (1829-30), Gregory XVI (1831-46), Pius IX (1846-78), Leo XIII (1878-1903), Pius X (1903-14), Benedict XV (1914-22), Pius XI (1922-39), Pius XII (1939-58), John XXIII (1958-63), Paul VI (1963-78), John Paul I (1978), John Paul II (1978-)

Now, I know what you're thinking. “How can I ever learn such a long list as that, me with my pea-sized brain?”, you're saying to yourself. Well, banish defeatism, reader! All you have to do is have a crack at this simple mnemonic. To make it even easier, there are many exclamation marks, adding that frisson of excitement which makes learning fun!

Plastic lantern. Astounding canal! Enormous, ailing squirrel. Torn hessian phosphorescent armbands. Stampeding elks! Vain zombies. Curious, unlikely ponds. Asbestos flap. Custard! Laughable soup. Stinking Dennis felt extremely cantankerous. More moorhens. Extra moorhens! Several magnificent jamjars. Liquid dental sluicing agents. Improbable zoo! Budgerigar. Caustic soda. Limitless hooting. Salacious foreign gentlemen. Argumentative shibboleth. Horrible juxtapositions. Floozie's birdbath. Jumbled antennae. Shoddy vellum packet. Jasper's bandage paste. German sausage. Balconies. Bees. Dead bees! Hideous squashed jumping Thuringian moths. Exciting villages and dismal airfields. Larks behind Javanese crime scene. Jackets. Jumpers. Spillages. Clark Gable's gazebo. Zither sounds. Suspected picnic situation alert. Lightning strikes! Peewit emergency! Violent goose scenario! Lapwings. Besmirched Norwegian, affable Jutlander. Maniac at Saint Fabrizio's bedside. Stupendous rhubarb. Thrown javelin breaks locked shed accident. Little juggler's little socks. Juggler's little socks. Mustard, all jars labelled badly. Jim's brontosaurus! Before Jim, Jack's golden shampoo jar, just shampoo, but just black, sickening, baleful grease. Can beetles die? Lovely violet splendour. Nits and gnats. Vituperative uproar. Plangent grovelling. Check his impenetrable calculations! Let's eat anchovies and asparagus! Let's uproot gooseberries! Come, come, impudent hysterical git! Canned ink. Alternative ultraviolet canister gas. I always jinx neurasthenic moonstruck hobbledehoys, nor can but be clattering jubilantly by crapulent infidels. Unspeakable gruel, unless boiled indefatigably. Gather more ergot. No cups. Perfect pods. Startling, incandescent, amazing pods! Jewelled, luminous and crimson pods! Jellied messes. Partridges. Peewits. Press-ganged shabby urchins glorying in crime. Levers. Prongs. Great useless impenetrabilia. Aniseed chocolate cake. It aids ignorance, cake. I brought clairvoyant badgers, champion curlews, pigs, pigs, Latvian pigs, grotesque pigs, lamentable pigs, bad pigs, pale, jabbering pigs, jabbering pigs, jabbering pigs!

Tundism

Readers will recall that Mrs Gubbins has managed to elude the police by gaining sanctuary with the Tundists. We have just received the latest brochure from the Tundist Owl Library and are delighted to report that the octogenarian crone has been appointed general editor of the Pamphlets About Owls For Tiny Tots series, which is certainly in need of a revival. Since the previous editor, Mr Binder, collapsed on a hillside twenty years ago, there has been only one addition to the series, the frankly unreadable Preen Your Owl With Verve & Gusto. According to the new brochure, Mrs Gubbins has exciting plans to issue at least two new pamphlets a week. We have sent a coded message asking if we can reprint some of them here, and await her reply.

An Owl

Further to the above, it strikes us that some readers may be unfamiliar with owls. They are a type of bird. Here is a picture of one.

Frustum, Tang, Sluice

One of Confidential Agent Blot's earlier investigative triumphs was cracking the case of the dishevelled marmalade man. Let us recall the facts. The whinnying of horses had disturbed the sleep of the little village of Spraingue for two months. There was a damp, hideous thing in the corner of the post office that none dared approach. Perhaps most jarring of all, an illegal cafeteria had been built slap in the middle of the village, surrounded by menacing guard dogs whose fangs glistened in the moonlight. Agent Blot arrived on the scene on a Tuesday afternoon frantic with gales. His dazzling cone-shaped hat made the villagers wonder what frustum it had once topped. His complexion was paler, more drawn and anguished than usual, possibly because a change in diet had given him a recent attack of the seeds, from which he was not yet fully recovered. His breath was tanged with the fumes of his weird pills, those tiny pink spangles Dr Glag had insisted upon. Agent Blot commandeered an abandoned birdseed silo as his headquarters, and subjected every single villager to a lengthy interrogation. His manner was charming but curiously unnerving. The clinic was soon filled with haunted-looking patients demanding to have their brains sluiced with Baxter's Terrible Fluid. By Saturday afternoon, with no let up in the gales, Spraingue had an air of almost Biblical calamity. And yet, and yet… as soon as his last interview was done with, Agent Blot sprang upon the dishevelled marmalade man and carted him off to the dungeon in his cave. The horses' whinnying ceased. The thing in the post office evaporated. A law was passed to make the cafeteria legal, and the dogs bounded away across the hills, their atrocious yapping growing ever fainter, until it could no longer be heard at all.

Glue and Gruel and God

“Dear Mr Key,” writes Poppy Nisbet, “I am worried that you and the other trusting folk at Hooting Yard have been seriously duped. I refer, of course, to your illustration of Mr Dust visiting the Pang Hill Orphanage (10th July). As he is depicted, Mr Dust has a suspicious halo, and the Pang Hill tinies look very rosy and well fed….Ah! I hear you say, but the Pang Hill gruel is second to none, and many have enjoyed good health as a result of its nourishing qualities! This may be, but it doesn't explain the tots' pious demeanor with hands in prayerful attitude or rosy crowns. Gruel is not God!”

Ms Nisbet will be pleased to hear that we take accusations of dupery, hoaxing and suchlike shenanigans very seriously, and upon receipt of her letter we immediately appointed a special investigator to look into the matter. Rastus Blot, a diminutive but effective confidential agent, was recommended to us by Mrs Gubbins. Working with admirable speed, Agent Blot presented us with a fifty-page report, the conclusion of which reads as follows:

There can be no doubt in my fuming brain that the man shown in the picture is Mr Dust the glue manufacturer. If you were to place your ear next to my skull you would probably be able to hear the synapses twang and whirr as my breathtaking intellect zipped into Supersonic Mode. It is no coincidence that the electrical impulses emitted by my cranium are enough to fell a bison at two hundred yards. Well, perhaps not a bison, but something smaller, an infant walrus perhaps, or a stoat. Now, in closing, may I politely suggest that you look very, very carefully at the subjoined map. If optically enhanced - like one of those grey, impossibly grainy photographs taken in Dealey Plaza on 22nd November 1963 - you will be able to see Mr Dust sitting at his desk in his office, and you will note that he looks identical to the picture reproduced last Saturday. What Poppy Nisbet terms a “suspicious halo” is quite simply an exciting circular lozenge.

Thew's Pod

On 30th April, we reported on the space-age-pod-turned-restaurant on the outskirts of Bodger's Spinney, noting that maverick Digby Thew had been appointed as head chef. Building work was completed early in June, and the eaterie has now been open for a month, so we thought we would find out from Mr Thew how things were going. Unfortunately, he was not available for comment, as he suffered a near-fatal casserole accident and is under heavy sedation in some clinic somewhere. His charming assistant chef, who preferred not to give her name, told us:

“With Digby out of the way, we have been able to turn the space-age-pod into a truly spectacular restaurant. Where else do you think you could get two slices of toast and a cup of boiled goo for the same price as a bag of toffees? The longer that nitwit stays in hospital the better for us, and the better for our customers. And that means better for the socioeconomic infrastructure of Bodger's Spinney and its windswept and dreary hinterland, from the oddly-shaped purple mountains of Lewdbag to the roadworks on the Blister Lane Bypass, from Pang Hill to Loopy Copse. Just the other day I was talking to one of the frogmen who drag the ponds for the bones of drowned birds, and he said that he had never known such bliss. You can't argue with that.”

Two Other Things

Today is, of course, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution. But let us also recall that it is the 91st birthday of ex-Potus Gerald R Ford, the man who pardoned Richard Milhous Nixon. Not only that, but on this day in 1916, when little Gerald was just three, Tristan Tzara declaimed the First Dada Manifesto in Zurich. Here is a link to a 1921 Dada Manifesto.

Land of Nod News

“Why,” writes Tim Thurn, “did you choose to illustrate chapter four of Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars [see yesterday, below] with a photograph of Emily Dickinson's gravestone? I cannot see the relevance.” Well, Tim, therein lies a story. For many years I have been plagued by nightmares about the Belle of Amherst. Sometimes she comes wafting towards me hovering in the air, surrounded by malignant hens or similar poultry. Sometimes I dream that I am sitting in a shaded bower, scented by honeysuckle and lilac, idly reading some imaginary pamphlet of Dobson's, when with terrifying suddenness a wraith-like Emily Dickinson appears before me, wailing, flailing a cutlass or scimitar at my head, a ghastly rictus distorting her face. At other times I have woken with Lovecraftian shudders, trying to expel horrible nightmare-visions of Emily Dickinson sat in the crows'-nest of a pirate ship, a necklace of teeth and bones around her white neck, dropping cake-crumbs on to the heads of the sailors below. So, Tim, every now and then I find that by contemplation of the poet's tombstone, with that irrevocable Called Back May 15th 1886, I can remind myself that she is indeed dead and gone, and so, for a few nights at least, my sleep will be untroubled by her restless spirit.

On a related note, readers may be interested to know that this morning I awoke from a vivid dream in which Pansy Cradledew got married to Anthony Newley (1931-1999), the actor, writer and musician (and influence on the young, Laughing Gnome-era David Bowie). Pansy hastens to assure me that this is not the case, citing that, like Emily Dickinson, the ex-husband of Joan Collins has also been “called back”. However, the alacrity with which she provided the picture below, a publicity shot for Mr Newley's 1969 film Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe And Find True Happiness?, gives one pause for thought.

The heading for this item, by the way, uses the Land of Nod in its now common sense as a euphemism for sleep. Lest we forget, Nod was the land to which Cain was banished after he slew his brother Abel. And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden (Genesis 4:16). One of Dobson's earliest pamphlets was a gazetteer of Nod, excerpts from which we hope to publish soon.

Club Hooting Yard

Book groups and reading clubs have become immensely popular in recent years, so it is unsurprising - if pleasing - that various Hooting Yard Study Groups have sprung up on at least three continents. As their name implies, the Study Groups adopt a more rigorous and earnest approach to texts than the often dilettanteish approach of the average book group. In Winnipeg, for example, where a group meets on a weekly basis, they have thus far spent six sessions on a close reading of the Istvan & Zoltan stories. (See the Unhelpful Index to locate these on the site.) The Dobsonians, a gathering which meets monthly in Ülm, devotes itself only to those items which refer to the out-of-print pamphleteer. Helpfully, they are at work on a catalogue raisonee which they have already entitled the Codex Dobsoniana, though how many years they will take on this valuable work is anybody's guess. Meanwhile, in some godforsaken Antipodean outpost, a trio of readers meet every Thursday to pose each other questions about the previous week's contents. They report that they have been scribbling both the questions and answers in a notebook and that they will photocopy it and send it to me when the book is full.

I noted that buyers of Microsoft's Encarta encyclopaedia are invited to join something called Club Encarta, and it seemed to me that all these study groups ought to come together under an umbrella Club Hooting Yard. I am working on a thoroughly exciting membership pack at the moment. If you would like to join, or to affiliate your existing study group, send an email to [email protected] for further details.

Airport Novel

I have been thinking about writing a big fat paperback, one of those novels disdained by the so-called literary world yet which sell in mighty amounts, often from airport bookstalls. Due to some sort of cultural blip, business persons who jet around the world being obnoxious still like to be seen reading something other than their latest sales reports, and the airport novel is a form created especially for them. It is never less than 736 pages long, and will usually have the title picked out in embossed gold on the cover. The contents will invariably be world-shuddering - a plot to destabilise NATO, for example - and militaristic, technological and “intelligence” matters will be described in preposterous detail. The film rights will have been sold before publication, but the film itself, if it is ever made, will never get a theatrical release. The hero's name will often be Graham Maitland. I had been toying with the idea of making mine a Vatican-related thriller called Pontiff! but was disappointed to discover that that title has already been taken. No matter. The point is that readers of these novels rarely get beyond page 243. Thereafter, I could pad out my text by reprinting long screeds from some out-of-copyright work - preferably The Anatomy of Melancholy - or by copying out technical data from an armaments company brochure. All I will need then is a blurb from the Daily Mail saying something like “Tighten your seatbelts - it's a rollercoaster ride!” or some such twaddle. Then I'll move to an offshore tax haven.

Some Ponds, a Hotel, the Hollyhocks

I - Some Ponds. There are seven ponds. Their names are Brink, Cramped, Dribble, Lamont, Presumption, Ravenous and Unholy. In a lead box at the bottom of one of the ponds an Icelandic fontoon lies sealed against the elements. But which pond? The fontoon is made of some nameless metallic alloy, and it has a long history. Countless learned tomes have been devoted to pondering its existence, location, significance, colour, smell, incontrovertibility and malevolence. Its value is incalculable. A facsimile made of petrified dough was sold by the Museum at Ack-on-the-Vug for an undisclosed sum. The identity of the buyer was also undisclosed, at the time. Now, this shadowy figure has the true fontoon almost in his clutches. He has booked in to a hotel just four hundred yards away from the ponds.

II - A Hotel. The major domo at the hotel stared out of the dining-room window. The sky was overcast. Soon the drizzle would begin. It always did. He hooted, once and once only. He was afraid of sheep, baffled by corkage, continually muttering about the gasworks, defiant, elegantly ragged, flappable during snowstorms, grotesquely carnivorous, helpless with starch, ignoble, just dying to shake hands with a lion tamer, kept waiting for hours by guests late for breakfast, lascivious yet hard of hearing, mistakenly shot at by poachers, nerve-wracked, overcoated, pitiful, quite likely to hoot for a second time, risibly bemuffled, still awaiting a voyage around the world, tempestuous every Thursday, unbelievably festooned with old sacking and netting, vigilant, weak, xerophilous despite the rain, young at heart and zestful at the prospect of his daily milk supplement. He hooted for a second time, much louder.

The hotel was fully occupied. Among the guests were anthropomorphic beings, bauxite miners, cartographers, dribbling thugs, elk fanciers, fontoon hunters, genuflecting dolts, heroic chefs, idiots savants, jugglers, kaolin quarry workers, lopsided people, marionettes, nautical curmudgeons, old besmirched gravediggers, pond draggers, quicklime spreaders, ruffians, sink bashers, taloned maniacs, untidy throwbacks, vinegar brewers, waxen image igniters, xylophone construction experts, yellow-bellied burblers and zinc inspectors. Watching them all gobbling down their breakfast porridge, the major domo tried to work out who was who. There appeared to be some trouble at one of the tables in the far corner. An aged couple, raddled and with frenzied gleams in their eyes, were raising their voices at a pallid and neurasthenic git still wearing his nightshirt. This man was Richard Widdmarke, implacable seeker of the Icelandic fontoon. His antagonists were a cartographer and a lopsided person. Their names were, respectively, Eileen and Wolfgang Hollyhock.

III - The Hollyhocks. Widdmarke did not realise that for over forty years the Hollyhocks had also been searching desperately for the Icelandic fontoon. Their interest had been ignited by Eileen's discovery of a tiny zinc fontoon in the Serengeti. It appeared to have talismanic properties, which Wolfgang had catalogued into seven basic groupings: elemental, dishevelled, yellow, crimped, congruent, dismal and vagabond. Among their luggage, the Hollyhocks carried the fruits of years of research. Eight hundred ledgers and a voluminous card index system contained information on all manner of fontoons, voils, Wesniod slabs, forensic triumphs and choir-stall scrapings. A parallel compendium of exciting facts about flags, pennants and bunting had fallen over the edge of their raft some years ago, or perhaps been lost in a swamp.

After the altercation at the breakfast table, the Hollyhocks realised that Richard Widdmarke was, like them, on the verge of discovering the sunken lead box containing the Icelandic fontoon. They immediately set out in the drizzle to drag the ponds. They wore horrifying mackintoshes. When they reached Lamont, the nearest of the ponds, they were outraged to find Widdmarke already there, equipped with a thrilling collection of nets, poles, metal detectors, rotating things, crimping irons, and booster guns…

The major domo stood at the dining-room window, peering out through the drizzle towards the seven ponds. A fight had broken out among three of the guests. Mackintoshes had been removed and boxing gloves donned. There were fisticuffs. There were gunshots. There was wailing. Before long, all three had managed to drown one another, and all in the same pond. But which pond? And was it the same pond at the bottom of which a lead box lay?

The major domo turned away, hooting quietly. He trudged into the kitchen and made a start on the porridge-encrusted bowls. He had work to do.

Bus Hydraulics

Glyn Webster writes : “The bus driver on my route has learnt to play music on the door-opening hydraulics of his bus. When a pretty woman signals for a stop, he likes to make the door go A Phoo A Phoota Phoo A Phoo-phoo Phoot! HISS as it opens. What is that tune?” Well, Glyn, if I'm not mistaken it could be either the Passacaglia or one of the Four Sea Interludes from Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes. Any readers wishing to look further into this matter can go to the splendid Vehicle Sound Effects page, where such alluring items as bus pulling away, bus turn signal, bus applying airbrakes and, indeed, bus door opening and closing can all be listened to.

Cataclysmic Winds

Cataclysmicandwindsare the opening two words of chapter four of our exciting serial novella Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars. To begin (or to continue) reading, click on the picture of Emily Dickinson's tomb.

Excessive Revolver Shooting & Related Matters

My old mucker Max Décharné has sent an amusing list gleaned from his current reading matter, What The Censor Saw by John Trevelyan. The British Board of Film Classification has always been keen to protect the public from depictions of moral turpitude, and Max has helpfully noted the following examples of forbidden topics:

1913 - Indecorous dancing. Native customs in foreign lands abhorrent to British ideas.

1914 -Incidents injurious to the reputation of Govermental Departments.Unnecessary exhibitions of feminine underclothing. The effects of vitriol throwing. Stories tinctured with salacious wit. Sensual exposition of Eugenic Doctrines.

1919 - Criminal poisoning by dissemination of germs. Excessive revolver shooting. Animals gnawing men and children*. Clutching hands.

1925 - Libels on the British nursing profession. Bolshevik propaganda. Abdominal contortions in dancing.

1926 - Employee selling his wife to employer to cover defalcations. Severed human heads. Degrading exhibitions of animal passion. Indecent wall decorations. Dangerous mischief, easily imitated by children. Lecherous old men. Themes which are likely to wound the just susceptibilities of our Allies. Comic hanging. Breaking bottles on men's heads.

1931 - Marriages within the prohibitive degree. Girls' clothes pulled off. The Salvation Army shown in an unfavourable light.

* NOTE : Presumably scenes showing animals gnawing women were allowed, then.

Scenes From Pang Hill Orphanage : Number One

On this day, in 1850, not only was Millard Fillmore inaugurated as the Potus (see 22nd June), but the grimy tots at Pang Hill Orphanage received a visit from one of their benefactors, Mr Dust, the noted glue manufacturer.

That Impossible Map of a Dismal Canal

It was made using embroidery, crayons, buttons, string and grease, and it was enormous. It was stored in an aircraft hangar. The forty aeroplanes that used to occupy the space had all been smashed up by an aeroplane-smashing machine. What a fantastic machine it was! Did you know that it could pulverise an Immelmann in less than two minutes? And do so almost silently? It would not be true to say that you could hear a pin drop, but a box of pins, yes, that you would have heard. No pins were used in the making of the map, except for that patch of darning where the canal cuts through the site of the Old Shabby Bakery, where a tiny lock-keeper's hut now stands, marked on the map by a tiny drawing of a tiny lock-keeper's hut done in red crayon. (The lock-keeper is tiny, not the hut.) The crayons used, incidentally, were waxen ones, as used by small children when first learning to draws cows or other barnyard animals. There are no cows pictured on the enormous map, because no cows stray near the canal. The elegantly-detailed border, however, is decorated with schematic motifs representing linnets, shrikes and cormorants, also in red crayon. Some have questioned why eels are shown thrashing about in the canal at various points, particularly near the darned portion of the map and at what is known as the “Mad Section”, but I am not at liberty to divulge the full facts of the matter until the centenary anniversary of the map's completion, by which time I will be old and incontinent and white of hair and dribbling and incoherent. I can hardly wait.

The Tale of Gaspard

Gaspard worked for the Gas Board. In appearance, he resembled the man dressed in red raising his left arm in Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Ship of Fools. (Incidentally, while we are - briefly - on the subject of art, you may or may not know that the famous foot from the credit sequence of Monty Python's Flying Circus was taken from Angelo Bronzino's Allegory : Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time.) Gaspard was both dutiful and dismaying. An air of glumness hovered o'er him; to some, it was a visible aura. Flies and other tiny annoying things with wings seemed to follow him around. Had he the wit, Gaspard could have made himself useful to the world's entomologists, but he was diffident as well as being dutiful and dismaying. His Gas Board desk was a sorry piece of office furniture, rickety and fragile. Gaspard sat at it for many, many hours each day, to no apparent purpose. There is a story by John Cheever which ends with the question: “Oh, what can you do with a man like that?” The same can be asked of Gaspard, for there is something almost inhuman in his dullness. Let us whisk him away, then, and place him in the icy wastes of Northern Canada, sitting on a felled log, surrounded by frisky reindeer, sipping from his flask of piping hot broth, as stars sparkle in the clear night sky. A voice booms from the heavens: “Gaspard! Gaspard!” He is stricken with terror, yet he knows this is the most important thing that has ever happened to him, so he reaches into the pocket of his anorak and takes out a little notepad and a biro. Irritatingly, just as he is about to jot down whatever supernatural commands he is to be given, the voice falls silent, and the only sound is that of a pitiless Arctic gale roaring in his ears. We shall leave him there, as he drinks the last of his broth, and though he remains ignorant of his destiny, we can rest assured that Gaspard is soon to become the Stipendiary Vizier of Cack and know aught but wassail and glee for all eternity, for he is immortal, and he is magnificent.

Further Lops of Note

A week ago, on Friday 2nd July, we looked at some interesting lops. Here are two more. Lop Buri in Central Thailand, formerly known as Lawo, was one of the important ancient towns of the Khmers from the 10th to the 13th centuries. Many Khmer ruins are found in and around this town. During the Ayutthaya period, King Narai the Great established Lop Buri as the second capital with the help of French architects. Most of the architecture of that time reflects the mixture of Thai and Western styles. Here is a handy map:

There is also the tantalising Project Lop, which has its own website. It's a shame I do not read Japanese. If I did, I would be able to glean the purpose of the project which, given the graphic above, is clearly something Dobson ought to have written a pamphlet about.

If I Had a Hammer

I'd hammer in the morning. I'd hammer very early in the morning, in what are called the small hours. I wouldn't hammer in the big hours, but I would use a big hammer. If I had a hammer, it would be a big hammer, and I would hammer in the small hours of the morning. But I no longer have a hammer. I have lost count of the times people come up to me and say, “Thaddeus,” they say, “For Christ's sake stop adjusting your eyepatch for one minute and tell me why you don't have a hammer.” What can I say? If I tell the truth - that I donated my hammer as a raffle prize for the Toffee Factory Charity Gala Night - I get that look of bewilderment and condescension that makes my blood boil and makes me want to start hammering my putative big hammer at four o clock in the morning. I then feel compelled to point out that all of the prizes on that fateful night were specifically requested by Mistress Brockbracke, who asked for donations of items that ended in -ammer, or its phonetic equivalent. So, in addition to my hammer, she was given a windjammer, a clamour (of rooks, in a spacious if rusty birdcage), a copy of Glamour magazine, a rubber stamp of the Greek letter gamma, several more hammers, and a banner, the latter given by the partially deaf man who loiters outside the post office with an eel wrapped round his neck. And I simply cannot be bothered to explain all that to the kind of people whose lives are so empty that all they can think about is to stop me mucking about with my eyepatch and to ask me why I haven't got a hammer.

Dobson's Heir?

Until I read yesterday's Guardian, I had never heard of Dr John W Trinkaus. Now, I am thinking of suing him for being a Dobson-impostor. Could anyone have followed Trinkaus' career path without having digested the complete works of the out-of-print pamphleteer? I think not. It turns out that this New York professor is almost as prolific as Dobson himself. Here is a list - by no means complete - of the subjects to which Trinkaus has turned his attention: bicyclists, Brussels sprouts, cases (attaché, opening of), chapel attendance (drop-in), cookies said to be baked by AIDS patients, empty beverage containers, gloves, lodging discount coupons, mentalists, parking areas, physicians’ offices (waiting time in), railway terminals, sirens, supermarket checkout delays, tongs and tissues, television game show contestants (handicapped), uncooked ground beef, winter storms (weather persons’ predictions of), yes (the word). If that does not make him a Dobsonista, then tie me to a tree and call me Barry, as Max Décharné has been known to say, often on Tuesdays. It turns out that, unlike his precursor, Dr Trinkaus has a considerable presence on the web. Go here to find out more about him.

Gratuitously, a Photograph of Ricardo Montalban, Because He Is Superb

Kataplat

Ah, the man Kataplat. He had a terrible countenance. There is a line in a Barbara Comyns novel describing a phantom with “a dreadful look of reproach on its face”. That was Kataplat, the furrier. He was a man of great erudition, a classicist with a love of Venice. He had a cat called Doge & a dog called Cato. His fearsomeness must not detain us, for the most fascinating thing about him, which must be recorded here, was that he was an elf. Yes! A true elf, not some Tolkeinish figure of cloying fantasy, but a real elf. Like all true elves, he was fond of cake, and of glass-blowing. And he dealt in furs, which will revolt some readers, and rightly so, but if you are an elf, needs must, which would be quite clear to you were you an elf, which you are not, which you are not, which you are not.

Queequeg

Queequeg was a member of the crew of the Pequod, in Moby-Dick, or; The Whale by Herman Melville (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1851). One of Queequeg's shipmates was, of course, Starbuck. It may be a tiny & futile way of joining the anti-globalisation protest, but here at Hooting Yard we always refer to the hydra-headed coffee bar chain as Queequeg's. (We do not neglect the apostrophe.) Another amusement is to wrench as many anagrams as possible from the word Starbucks. Burst sack and back truss are pleasing, although for lovers of medieval musical instruments, and by cheating a little (adding the national designation US) it is possible to slurp your coffee at Sackbuts R Us.

Oops!

Yesterday I was so preoccupied with things rotating around a central spindle, inside a cave, albeit a false cave, a toy one made of plastic, which dropped out of a carton I found in a skip, in Didcot, that I completely forgot that Chapter Three of the exciting serial Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars ought to have appeared, it being Monday. That lapse has been remedied, as you will discover if you click on the picture of five Vietnamese tubes of toothpaste, the startling relevance of which will become apparent…

Distant Dustbins

I said to Smotter: “When that wagtail flew past my head, I did not know it was a wagtail. I thought it may have been a pipit, for I know very little about birds.” Spookily, at the very instant the words were out of my mouth, Smotter boarded a bus which took him far, far away, so crushing any hopes I had of improving my ornithological knowledge that morning. The number of the bus that Smotter caught had mystic significance, so I made a note of it on one of my bits of paper. My pockets are full of them. Every year, on Savonarola's birthday, I empty out from my coats and jackets all the accumulated scraps, stack them into a pile, randomly ordered, and type up my jottings verbatim. I have usually forgotten the context and import of most of my notes, so I have about as much idea as the readers of my annual Pocketsbook [sic] what it all means. In the early days, I separated each piece with an ellipsis, but at some point - possibly around the time of Lynnette “Squeaky” Fromme's assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford, I cannot be precise - I just ran one note headlong into another. Hence there are passages such as the month of Frumentor possible pills for unknown disorders what is in the garden of the parsonage and why oo nooky (anag) printer's devil Gerard Manley Hopkins mesmerised a duck two sausage recipes and so on. Thus do I wring sense from a baleful planet.

And No Birds Sing

Or do they? Here at Hooting Yard we have taken on a new member of staff to assist us in all matters ornithological. The interview process was exhausting, possibly because our recruitment advert, by some mishap, appeared in Bee People magazine instead of Jobs For The Bird-Obsessed, our publication of choice. That misunderstanding dealt with, we questioned what in the name of heaven had persuaded us to hold the selection process in the annexe of a House Of Sortilege & Magick hard by the banks of a tempestuous river on the point of bursting its banks, fourteen miles from the nearest railway station. We eventually appointed Jim Pond, a man with a blue hat and dozens of library tickets, who suggested that his first contribution ought to be some birdsongs: the lapwing, the curlew, and quite alarmingly, the carrion crow. Jim has now gone off to join the Richard Milhous Nixon Memorial Sweatlodge, and it is unclear if he is ever coming back.

Some Hotels, a Hollyhock, the Ponds

I - Some Hotels. There are seven hotels. Their names are Crone, Crustacean, Flask, Infection, Miasma, Unbearable and Vagabond. Each is built of cheap and rusty metal and perched on the edge of a precipice. There are seven precipices, over each of which a scientist of note has plunged to a watery death during the past two weeks. In chronological order, those who plummeted were a botanist, a physicist, a phrenologist, an horologist, a laboratory git, a bacteriologist, and an uproariously-moustachioed vivisectionist. Each had been a paying guest at one of the hotels, though none of them hurtled over the precipice upon which their own hotel teetered. The phrenologist, for example, breakfasted upon porridge in the Hotel Miasma, then threw herself from the pocked and crumbling cliff-face adjacent to the Crone Hotel. Or was she pushed?

It is in hope of answering this question that the indefatigable Hungarian detective Bulent Hellbag has trudged on to the scene. He is seven feet tall, sports a raffish windcheater, and has booked in to all seven hotels within the space of half an hour, using a variety of aliases and disguises. At the Infection Hotel, he is known to the desk staff as Mr B McGrewge, a Scottish safety engineer of sober mien and modest wealth, his only luggage a small orange tote bag. At the Hotel Vagabond, he has them convinced that he is Baron Glubb Von Glubb, a fanatical winter sports enthusiast, lewd and boisterous, who displays a fine array of bobsleigh championship medals upon his turquoise tunic. For these, and for his five other identities, Detective Hellbag has all the required documentation: forged passports and letters of transit, doctored photographs, beetle diagrams, and other seemingly personal paperwork.

At four p.m., firmly established in all seven hotels, he is to be found pasting a piece of blotting paper at head height to the outside wall of the Crustacean Hotel laundry room. Such attention to detail is the mark of the great detective, and Hellbag is in no doubt as to the sheer magnitude of his ratiocinative genius. As ever, he has imposed upon himself a strict timetable for solving this case. He is confident that he can wrap it up within forty-eight hours. Indeed, such is his arrogance that he has overlooked one startling fact. The major domo at the Hotel Unbearable is Hellbag's brother Rolf, whom he has not seen for ten years. The last time they met, in vegetation and in awe, they made a handshake last for hours. Then, two days later, Rolf was sentenced to hang for the brutal slaying of a Loopy Copse ship's captain, whose skull he smashed to pieces with a stolen windigo.

II - A Hollyhock. The most luxurious of the hotels is the one beginning with B. Its tremendous gardens, festooned with foliage, were until recently tended by a retired cake person whose glaucoma and rickets gave him increasing gyp. Following a series of incidents involving his shark or his cardigan, he was

[None of the hotels has a name beginning with B. Discard and resume.]

The least repugnant of the hotels is the one beginning with F. Its gardens are neither tremendous nor foliage-riddled, nor tended by a half-blind, shark-owning person of cake. Indeed, it can hardly be said to have a garden at all. The floor of the lobby is covered in soil or mud, and ridiculous chaffinches witter from the rooftops, but the only foliage to be seen in the Flask Hotel is a huge cement hollyhock in the dining room, placed there by a permanent resident, Imber Sedge by name, whose often truculent gob ill befits a man of the cloth.

Cleverly concealed atop the very pinnacle of the cement hollyhock is a sliver of pugsley, imbued with monstrous properties. It is at once refulgent and calcareous, dismaying and arcane. In years past, those who sought to possess it had had their heads boiled. Three weeks ago, the surly Sedge implanted the hollyhock in the hotel which he called home, and proceeded to paint it with a thick impasto of gaudy colours. He had stolen the paint from a wooden hut next to one of the nearby ponds, not realising that in doing so he was burgling the nerve centre of Rolf Hellbag's frantic and unholy criminal schemes. Within days of Sedge's theft, a stench of vinegar hung in the air about his head, and his tongue grew furry.

III - The Ponds. On Wednesday, Bulent Hellbag toured the nearby ponds. His bakelite satchel contained the tools of his trade: an adze, brooches, chalcedony, a dubbin tray, experimental poultices, Fontoons, gewgaws of every description, hat paste, illegal Spode, a javelin, kaka, lettuce, monkey puzzles and night soil, old gas, potato peel, quartz, recent newspaper cuttings, stigmata, a tapeworm, uncanny torchlight, vestiges of trouser, wild goo, a xiphoid rug, Yorkshire pudding and zibeline. He knew his onions.

The wind came in from the sea, echoing with the wails of the ghosts of perished scientists. Hellbag placed his satchel on a knot of furze, and carefully untied the rope with which he had bound the massive cement hollyhock to his body. Easing it to the ground, he spat and spat and spat. Then he hurled the hollyhock into the deepest of the twenty-six ponds.

Preening in the drizzle, Hellbag congratulated himself on another case successfully concluded. Minutes earlier, a ferocious pack of half-starved brontosauruses had been unleashed from his brother Rolf's laboratory in the cellars of the Hotel Unbearable. As the great detective puffed on a cheroot, they lurched over the brow of the hill, lumbering towards him, relentless and vast.

Picture Quiz

Ever mindful of the need to keep our readers entertained in these grim summer months, we have devised this exciting new feature. Below is an illustration, accompanied by some searching questions. Write your answers on a piece of paper, and paste it into your commonplace book using one of the adhesives available in all good stationery shops. This will become something to treasure for years to come.

1. What is the name of the monarch at whom a bomb is being thrown?

2. Why has the monarch let drop his baubled sceptre?

3. Which beast of the field was shorn to provide the material for the monarch's ill-fitting gloves?

4. If your answer to question 3 is “dromedary”, what led you to that conclusion?

5. Do you think Condoleezza Rice is quite scary?

6. Look carefully at the assassin's suit. Does it have panache?

7. Oh what can ail thee, knight at arms / Alone and palely loitering? / The sedge has withered from the lake / And no birds sing. (Keats) Why has the sedge withered?

Happy Birthday, Franz

Today is, or would be, Franz Kafka's 121st birthday. Two things worth remembering about Mr K. Although one thinks of him as a haunted, pallid, neurasthenic wreck, he was in fact an enthusiastic oarsman who enjoyed rowing boats. The other thing I find quite arresting is that he was a keen Fletcherist, which made his table manners trying, to say the least. Fletcherism was (is) a system of eating which involves chewing each bite of food until it becomes a watery mass in your mouth before swallowing. This has two effects. First, if you chew a bite of food that long, you will be consuming your meal at a slower rate. Secondly, the reduction of this food to liquid goo means that it will be less difficult to extract the nutrients. I am not sure whether it is true that the recommended number of mastications is thirty-two (one for each tooth). Horace Fletcher (1849-1919) was an American businessman from Lawrence, Massachusetts who expounded his theories in a number of excitingly-titled books, including Fletcherism : What It Is or How I Became Young At Sixty, The New Menticulture, The AB-Z Of Our Own Nutrition, and The New Glutton Or Epicure. He was known to cycle up to two hundred miles a day. Other notable Fletcherists included John D Rockefeller, Upton Sinclair, and Henry James. Incidentally, I read somewhere that Henry James in his final years became deluded and was convinced that he was Napoleon Bonaparte.

Fletcherism ought not be confused with Daltonism, which is the technical term for colour blindness. John Dalton (1766-1844) was a British chemist and physicist, born at Eaglesfield, near Cockermouth in Cumberland. In 1794 he published the first scientific paper on the subject, Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours.

Whither Blenkinsop?

Whither Blenkinsop? It is a question I have asked myself, oh, dozens of times in the past fortnight. That was when I last saw him, the titanic blob of a man, as he trundled away from me aboard his self-constructed space-age uber-tractor, heading, he said, for the Big Disused Radish Cannery near Crapwing. So far as anybody knows, he never arrived. His vehicle, uncannily riddled with what looked like age-old rust, was found in a thicket, as if deliberately concealed by a malefactor. A boot which may have belonged to Blenkinsop lay in the muck a few yards away. There were signs that an attempt had been made to remove the bootlace, which was splattered with stains of an unknown and possibly extra-terrestrial substance of fabulous blue. Mordant herons, gathered in a clump nearby, seemed to be suffering the ill-effects of this goo, whatever it was. Then, on Thursday, the night editor of the Daily Spasm took delivery of a parcel. It had been inexpertly-wrapped in corrugated cardboard and smelled of pig. Reluctant to divulge the contents, the newshound handed it to the police, who sent it to their forensic laboratory, which burned to the ground the next day, when a rookie lab assistant carelessly discarded a not-quite-spent lucifer in a wastepaper basket containing a petri dish of something monstrous, invisible and volatile concocted by the evil experimentalist Dr Turp, who had inveigled his way into the lab through a combination of charm and cunning. Now, it is known that Dr Turp once belonged to the same hat-collecting club as Blenkinsop. For this reason alone, he was taken into custody by the doughty Inspector Brazilnut on the day after the fire. This morning I purchased a railway ticket, and in a few minutes I shall board the train to Crapwing, where I shall confront Dr Turp as he stands arraigned in the dock of the assizes, and I shall blow his brains out with a fat and shiny pistol.

Some Interesting Lops

First, let us consider Ferdinand Lop. During the Fourth Republic in France, Lop was a serial election candidate. Perhaps his most memorable policy was his promise to extend the Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris in both directions until it reached the sea. I am not making him up. So often did his candidacy for various offices appear on ballot papers that he provoked the creation of an anti-Lop party, called, superbly, the Anti-Lops.

Second, Loplop, Max Ernst's “Bird Superior”, which first appeared in 1929. Here it is:

This anthropomorphic bird-man with beaked head and human body (occasionally depicted with wings as well) became Ernst’s alter ego in numerous works in different media - collage, painting, and relief. Loplop is sometimes represented as a complete figure, sometimes in abbreviated fashion with disembodied head and hand, as he presents or introduces pictures within pictures - leaves or flowers, a young woman, fellow Surrealists, butterflies or, as in the picture above, other birds.

Third, and still on the topic of birds, we have the lopwit. This bird does not actually exist, although I thought it did. It appears in A Catalogue Of 53 Birds, and pretty much nowhere else. A Google search for “lopwit” elicits four results, two of which are from Hooting Yard. And I was convinced that such a thing as the lopwit existed. Ah well.

The Bodger's Spinney Variety Theatre

Walk with me down memory lane as we recall some of the enticing acts who appeared at the Bodger's Spinney Variety Theatre during its golden age:

Nobby Puck : The Human Windsock.Bells clanged whenever Nobby Puck appeared on stage. For ten awful days in the summer of 1907 he was held incommunicado by a gang of Papist fanatics. He escaped by means of a clever poison-gas device which he kept tucked inside his vest, and made his way back to Hooting Yard just in time to do his windsock act at the annual jamboree.

Minnie Crunlop And Her Trailing Bandage.Over the years, many scholars have attempted to estimate the true length of Minnie Crunlop's bandage. Brewgit, the infamous Prussian quack entomologist, devoted over forty scientific papers to the question, leading his arch rival Buttonglue to accuse him of trifling, simplemindedness, and trafficking in poltrooneries. Brewgit was livid, and challenged his tormentor to a duel. They met in a desolate spinney at dawn. For weapons, they had magnetic cast-iron bradawls, sharpened to the point of implausibility. Before their scrimscrum could begin, however, Brewgit tripped over an abandoned churn, while Buttonglue developed a nosebleed. The affaire was never satisfactorily resolved, more's the pity.

Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet.Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet was the brainchild of one Horst Preen, a dishevelled tugboat captain from Tantarabim. On a birthday frolic in a disused bun factory, he quite by chance discovered a matchless talent for disguise and physical agility. Apart from the famous Magnet Boy! act, he thrilled two continents with his wonderful ability to curl himself up into a ball and bounce across wide canals.

The Highly Infectious Renshaw Family.The highly infectious Renshaw family were fond of butter, crocuses and finch lures. Astonishingly hard-hearted, they enjoyed taunting the aged, infirm, sick, halt and lame.

Mad Harry Gubbins And His Life-Size Cork Effigy.Interviewed by the police in connection with the Strange Case of the Dog-eared Postage stamp, Mad Harry Gubbins made the following statement: “I have always gone to and fro accompanied by my cork effigy. It was presented to me on my twenty sixth birthday by my uncle, Demented Wenceslas Gubbins, with the express injunction that, were I to abandon the effigy, for example by leaving it leaning against a lamp-post near the docks, he would pursue me to the end of my days and badger me to throw myself into a pond.”

Guesbaldo Fubby And His Amazing Tea Strainers.Not for nothing was Guesbaldo Fubby known as the Tycho Brahe of Hooting Yard. For one thing, he had a wooden nose, following a youthful polevaulting accident. He kept his nose carefully varnished and, at nightfall, he placed it in a little titanium jar at his bedside. “His tea strainers,” wrote Erskine Childers, “drove me crackers”.

Ingmar And Hetty : The Burst Appendix Twins.Ingmar and Hetty - who were not actually twins, and whose real names were Ingmat [sic] Baskerville and Magnesia Flowerdewdrop - hailed from a small island in the North Sea, from which they were expelled for reasons unknown. Adept at plunging metal objects into basins of salt water, they were killed in 1924 while picknicking near ostriches.

Underwater Pencil Sharpening With Rufus Corncrake.When Rufus Corncrake was but a tiny tot, he was carried in a majestic charabanc to the seaside resort of Shincramp, where, being fed on whelk-flavoured ice cream and acidic toffee, he was taken to the top of a big shiny plastic-and-tin upended-hovercraft-shaped helter skelter, had his library ticket removed from the pocket of his tunic, and was pushed, by his parents, down the spiralling vortex of the ride, halfway down which he was yanked by the scruff of his neck up into the illimitable heavens by an agency unknown and unthinkable, only to be deposited, four hours later, on top of the belfry tower at the great cathedral of St Frack, in the piping hot town of Ack on the Vug.

Captain Snap, The Cheery Bird-Strangler.Captain Snap was a proper caution. Plagued by a chesty cough, whitlows, and varicose veins, he was nevertheless the finest bird-strangler of his generation. Within his bailiwick, he adopted an air of unflappability. At his command, little children would happily chew their conkers and polish their hats.

Edith O'Shaughnessy, The Woman With The Small Plasticine Badger.Was Edith O'Shaughnessy the living reincarnation of that most alarming of medieval minstrels, the irksome and cantankerous Gervase de la Maudling, who had once tossed quoits with the heir to the Finnish throne, and whose foppish mannerisms when hoisting his own flags on gala days made him a laughing stock? Almost certainly not.

The Zany World Of Claude Boohoocha And His Grotesque Sponge Hood.Claude Boohoocha used a spoon to eat his peas. When feeding upon buckwheat, gelatine or lampreys, he made use of a gigantic tin fork. A gleaming and very, very sharp knife came into play when he ate prunes, Paxo stuffing, the stalks of hollyhocks, or cream crackers. Whenever he had his dinner, he lodged his grotesque sponge hood in the lost property office at an important railway station, selected from a computerised database of over forty such termini.

The World-Famous Food-Splattered Jesuit.The world-famous food-splattered Jesuit was perhaps the most popular act ever to appear at the Bodger's Spinney Variety Theatre. Why? Because - quite simply - he tapped a deep vein of what the Tundists call “Tund”. That's why.

Two More Lops

The more you turn your mind to lops, the more lops sally forth. Here, for example, is a Holland Lop rabbit.

And, lest we forget, that 20th century Khmer Rouge nutcase Pol Pot becomes the “Top Lop” when his name is spelled backwards, which can't be said about many other people. Well, nobody else at all, actually.