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AWebsite by Frank Key
"Baffling, erudite, funny, vertiginously bizarre, digressive, obsessive, eccentric and poignant." (Counter Productions) ... "Arcane, slightly weird, lovely, witty and eminently readable." (One Faint Deluded Smile) ... "A haven for people who like words they can savour, and lots of them." (The Independent On Sunday) ... "Frankly insanely bizarre." (Barbelith Underground) ... "There is contrived weird and real weird and I suppose you qualify as real weird." (my brother) ... "Reminds me of Max Ernst engravings gone Bonzo Doo-Dah." (The Guardian)
* LATEST ADDITION OF LOPSIDED PROSE : 26 NOVEMBER 2006 *
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SUNDAY 26th NOVEMBER 2006
HIATUS
We've had another hiatus here at Hooting Yard. The chief reason for this is that I agreed to take part in an experiment and have spent the last two months living as an otter. Only yesterday did Professor Tadaaki pull up at the riverbank in his big yellow rusty jeep to tell me that I had misheard his instructions and wasted valuable research time splashing about to no apparent purpose.
I towelled myself dry and traipsed home in a bit of a temper, because the good Prof did not see fit to tell me what it was that I had misheard. Was I meant to have been living as a hatter? As a nutter? Who knows? Anyway, I am home now, and have already started scribbling prose to provide my loyal readers with entertainment, instruction, and a diversion from autumn thoughts of knitwear and shove-ha'penny. Now read on…
UNTITLED WORK IN PROGRESS
Look at this man coming up the path, the waterlogged path. They call him the district line dentist. He has dentistry in his blood. He has blood on his shoes. Blood on his shoes, talc in his hair, and as he walks along the waterlogged path he is shouting and shouting and shouting. The blood on his shoes is still wet and warm from the slaughtering he has been engaged in, up in the hills, where the district line never goes. It is not the blood of humans. There are no humans in those hills, only cardboard figures, and hardboard figures, and balsa wood figures, and an enormous colony of very, very frightening birds, like savage and pitiless birds from an ancient myth, except that these birds are real, fat with feathers, and absolutely terrifying. You may have seen their like on the sides of buses in Pointy Town, for it was images of similar birds that were used in that ill-conceived advertising campaign for a brand new type of fizzy and frothing detergent pill which, it was claimed, would put more pep into your pots and pans. We know that banging pots and pans is a traditional method of scarifying birds, but it would not work with these birds, the ones that perch on the cardboard and hardboard and balsa wood figures in the hills from which the man they call the district line dentist has just descended, with blood on his shoes and a song in his heart. That is why he is shouting. He has a song in his heart but he cannot sing. His song is about the sad final days of Edgar Allan Poe, and the chorus replicates that neurasthenic writer's dying words…. "Reynolds! Reynolds! Reynolds!" That is what the district line dentist is shouting as he clumps along the path in his blood-soaked shoes. He clumps with a limp, for his legs are of uneven length, only just, but decisively so. He was not born that way. When he was a cherubic bonny baby both his legs were measured, and they were found by several independent authorities to be identical in length. Something happened to him between then and now to mar his symmetry, something he has always blamed on the ferocious birds up in the hills. That is why he is such a bitter man and a bird hater.
He hated birds, but he was fond of moles. He had a little toy mole made of cambric and string, a puppet you could call it, which sat on a china plate on the dresser in the parlour of the boarding house by the seaside where he lived. Seeing a mole on a plate, many people chided the district line dentist that it looked as if he wanted the mole for his dinner, albeit that it was only a cambric and string toy. The presence of a knife and fork alongside the plate served only to emphasise this misapprehension, but that was part of his plan, or I should say part of one of his many plans. Dentistry was in his blood, but he no longer practised that trade, for he was an old, old man, retired to a seaside boarding house, a boarding house named after Ray Milland, the film star who memorably appeared in The Man With X-Ray Eyes. The gardens of the boarding house were riotous with foxgloves, and as you may know, foxgloves are poisonous to moles. At least, that is the case in the land of which I speak, it may or may not be the case elsewhere in the boundless universe. But of course the foxgloves which bloomed in the Ray Milland boarding house gardens were not harmful to the district line dentist's mole, for it was but a toy, a plaything, sat on its plate on the dresser. The cutlery aligned next to the plate was of exquisite workmanship, of the finest metal, manufactured, according to legend, by gnomes, though the tales told of these gnomes were full of holes, and every version was different. Sometimes the gnomes were said to live under a big bright mountain far away, and sometimes they were said to spend their lives jetting from one paradise island to another, making their knives and forks and spoons during stopovers in airport snack bars. In truth, nothing can have been more mundane than the actual making of the cutlery, and gnomes played no part in it. Every last teaspoon and sugar tong was made in a great grim factory, guarded by beagles, plonked in a field at the end of the district line, Hallelujah Field, where no grass grew, only weeds and tares.
There are storms in teacups and barn-storms, but it is a very particular sort of storm that engages our attention now. Henry Cow recorded a piece entitled Bittern Storm Over Ulm, the title taken from a passage in one of Charles Fort's compendia of anomalous phenomena, and likewise, we are dealing with a storm of birds. For up in the hills where the district line never goes, a surge of magnetism convulsed the colony of terrifying birds, and they filled the sky, screeching and shrieking, maddened beyond measure. Hearing the racket, the dentist clumped to a halt on the waterlogged path. His shoes were steeped in the blood of slaughtered birds, but for each one he had killed, dozens more had appeared, flapping in from who knows where, gathering in the hills, perched and brooding and awaiting the burst of magnetic energy sending them into a storm in the sky. But this was Pointy Town, not Ulm, and these were no bitterns. And the waterlogged path that came down from the hills led, in its meandering way, to a cluster of huts on the beach, huts that once belonged to boat builders, Noah figures whose beards were stiff with the salt of the sea, long gone now, the boats they built shattered and broken, wooden fragments scattered across the sands, eaten by worms, as those who built the broken boats were themselves devoured as they lay in their tombs in the pretty churchyard of Saint Bibblydibdib's, hard by the beach, and popular with poets. Sand worms and earthworms, and the work they do, have been ignored by the graveyard poets of Pointy Town, and for that they should be ashamed. The district line dentist was heading for the huts where once boats had been built, for there he believed he would find sanctuary from the vengeful birds. Pelange and Froumier are among those who have written authoritatively about ritual appeasement of bird gods, and while I am not suggesting for one moment that there is a divinity lurking in the breasts of those screeching horrors in the sky over the hills - the sky now black with their swooping, flapping savagery, incidentally - yet we would do well to recall, in particular, Pelange's nostrum regarding protecting shrouds. But of course, that popinjay writer knew nothing of birds driven bonkers by eerie magnetic forces which we still do not fully understand. Luckily for him, the district line dentist did.
It was no accident that the church by the beach was consecrated to Saint Bibblydibdib, for he was the patron saint of something or other resonant of marine life. He is one of those saints for whom there is no convincing evidence of his actual existence, and it may be that he was simply a phantom shimmering in vapours from the brains of seaside mystics. Buried in the churchyard was one such mystic, a wise woman known as the Woohoowoodiwoo Woman. Legend in those parts held that she it was who had fallen foul of the birds in the hills, and had pelted the old boat builders with potatoes until they ceased to build boats, and that she had done so because she lived in mortal fear not only of the birds but of the sea. Hideous aquatic beings haunted her nightmares, from which she would awake crying "Woohoowoodiwoo!", hence the name by which she was known. Intriguingly, on 22nd November 1963, the day of the Kennedy Assassination, she awoke screaming "Reynolds! Reynolds! Reynolds!", like Edgar Allan Poe on his deathbed, but we do not know why, and nor did she ever divulge her dream, even to the district line dentist, who did her bridge canal work, and praised the enamel of her molars, and was her confidante and, some said, her inamorata, all those years ago, before the frightening birds haunted the hills, and while boats were still built in the cluster of huts on Pointy Town beach, the huts clustered between two coastal features called impagu and sacketysack. She was invariably dressed, even festooned, in those days, in a maroon shawl, the Woohoowoodiwoo Woman. Maroon, too, was the colour of the plumage of the most frightening of the frightening birds. Did the shawl act as her protective shroud, a la Pelange? The district line dentist suffered from Daltonism, or colour blindness, and he knew not what maroon was, nor how it differed from blue. As we know, maroon and blue are the two 'foundation' colours in the Blotzmann Register.
FRIDAY 15th SEPTEMBER 2006
"We have visited the pretty English burial-ground, and the tomb of Smollet, which in the true English style is cut and scratched all over with the names of fools, who think thus to link their own insignificance to his immortality. We have also seen whatever else is to be seen, and what all travellers describe: to-morrow we leave Leghorn - for myself without regret: it is a place with which I have no sympathies, and the hot, languid, damp atmosphere, which depresses the spirits and relaxes the nerves, has made me suffer ever since we arrived." - Anna Brownell Jameson, The Diary Of An Ennuyee
WWDD
It has become fashionable among pious young Christian folk, particularly in the United States, to wear wristbands bearing the letters WWJD. This simple formula announces that the wearer has devoted their life to Christ, and faces any and all situations by asking the question What Would Jesus Do? Leaving aside the objection that the daily challenges faced by a mystic carpenter in Palestine two thousand years ago may not be wholly applicable to the kinds of 'issues' facing a young person hanging around a mall in Poughkeepsie in the twenty-first century, I think there is much to be said for this approach. If nothing else, it must lead to some interesting behaviour.
For one thing, Jesus had a tendency to perform miraculous feats, such as walking on water or distributing improbable amounts of bread and fish. Then there were his occasional temperamental outbursts, as when he shooed a gang of moneylenders out of a temple. It's to be hoped that the pious teenies emulate this kind of thing rather than Jesus' rather priggish sermonising, for which he had a weakness. Although there are one or two nuggets of wisdom in his preaching, more often it is reminiscent of the airy New Age twaddle one might get from Deepak Chopra and his ilk.
The difficulty remains, though, that a contemporary teenager is going to face circumstances that Jesus simply never had to deal with, all those years ago. Nowadays, the average young American Christian does not spend much time involved with oxen, say, or fatted calves, much less with tares and talents and the blood of the lamb. Young Tad or Biff is likely to get more het up about soda pop, baseball caps, and stadium rock. Working out what Jesus would do thus becomes a very fraught endeavour. Hours upon hours of Biblical study will go some way to resolving the problems, but sooner or later the morally anguished teen will resort to booze and drugs and firearms.
Here at Hooting Yard, we have come up with an elegant solution to these modern dilemmas. We will soon unleash on the market wristbands bearing the legend WWDD. What would Dobson do? There is a simple beauty to this, in the sense that, whatever the situation, the answer is always "Write a pamphlet! (out of print)".
WEDNESDAY 13th SEPTEMBER 2006
"Drunkenness, immorality and disease go hand in hand - a dreadful three. But more than this. The drunken man takes much longer over the sex-act, thereby prolonging the risk of disease, and he runs risks which he would rule out instantly if the fumes of alcohol had not changed the tawdry girl into the glittering fairy. Worse than all, he neglects to apply disinfection properly and promptly - he falls asleep or forgets all about it till too late. Men who are determined to have a 'night out' should use calomel ointment (or some other substitute) before they start and if they have been in liquor they should disinfect instantly when they recover their sober senses." - Ettie A Rout, Safe Marriage : A Return To Sanity
BLODGETT'S JIHAD
Bad Blodgett! One Tuesday in spring, he went a-roaming among the Perspex Caves of Lamont, part of that magnificent artificial coastline immortalised in mezzotints by the mezzotintist Rex Tint. Sheltering in one of the caves from a sudden downpour, Blodgett took his sketchbook out of his satchel and passed the time making a series of cartoon drawings of historical figures. The pictures were imaginary likenesses, of course, for Blodgett was ignorant of many things, and he had no idea what Blind Jack of Knaresborough looked like. Nor was he at all sure that his double cartoon of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray bore any resemblance to the stars of Double Indemnity. The rain showed no sign of ceasing, so Blodgett filled page after page, scribbling drawings of Marcus Aurelius, Christopher Smart, Mary Baker Eddy, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, and the Prophet Mohammed, among others. It was this last cartoon that caused ructions which were to have so decisive an effect on Blodgett's life.
Later that day, on his way home from the Perspex Caves of Lamont, Blodgett inadvertently left his sketchbook on the bus. A week or so later, a bus company employee was checking through the lost property and took a few moments to leaf through the book. Turning the fateful page, this employee - an adherent of the Islamic faith - was by turns outraged, humiliated, mortally offended and infuriated when he saw Blodgett's cartoon. As is the way with such matters, he immediately arranged for copies to be distributed to mullahs and imams around the world, so that they too could share his outrage, humiliation, mortal offence and fury. Soon there were calls for Blodgett to be beheaded or otherwise put to death, and he went into hiding. Let's take a look at the picture, so that we can understand what all the fuss was about.
Blodgett's cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed
(In an interesting side note, there was a similar flurry of anger from a sect devoted to the cult of Fred MacMurray, but this fizzled out after Blodgett pledged to attend a penitential screening of one of the actor's late pieces of Disney pap.)
Meanwhile, hiding out in the Perspex Caves of Lamont, the evil cartoonist had time to think through what had happened. Blodgett was aware that the Victorian atheist Charles Bradlaugh had described the Christian Gospels as being "concocted by illiterate half-starved visionaries in some dark corner of a Graeco-Syrian slum", and he did not think it much of a leap to conclude that the Prophet Mohammed was an equally deluded soul, although perhaps a better-organised one, with access to weaponry which enabled him to spread his message faster and more efficiently.
Around this time, Blodgett received through an intermediary an offer from the furious and offended Islamists. The sentence of death could be rescinded, they suggested, if he made a sincere conversion to their faith and promised to live out the rest of his days in submission to Allah. Blodgett considered this for about forty seconds before rejecting it. Apart from anything else, he reasoned, it was very unlikely that Mrs Blodgett would agree to spend the rest of her life cocooned in a person-sized tent and to stop going out by herself.
Shortly after this, still in hiding, Blodgett had a brainwave. Indeed, he became somewhat furious and offended himself. The conversion offer, he decided, was an example of the old cliché "If you can't beat them, join them". Well… he would join them, but not in the way they thought. If half-starved visionaries could propagate the Christian gospels, and Mohammed could claim to have heard the voice of God, as so many others down the centuries had insisted, with varying degrees of success, that they were in direct contact with supernatural powers, what was to stop Blodgett announcing that he, and only he, had found the true path? From this spark of inspiration was Blodgettism born.
He began to make clandestine visits to the municipal library at Blister Lane, devouring, among other works, the Qu'ran, the Bible, the collected works of L Ron Hubbard and David Icke, the Book of Mormon, sacred texts from all the major religions and many of the minor ones, even a couple of novels by Ayn Rand. After a few weeks of constant reading, Blodgett set out to define Blodgettism. He did not want it to be a synthesis of every other faith - that seemed a little too pat, a little too Blavatskyesque - and nor did he want it to be simply an amalgam of the good bits. Considering that he was still under sentence of death from a number of shouting men with beards, Blodgett wanted Blodgettism to be a faith at once as rigorous and intransigent as Islam. Thus, he cast aside with reluctance some of the more amusing things he had learned, such as underwear regulations in Mormonism, and Mr Hubbard's intergalactic drivel, and fixed his attention on jihad. As far as jihad-as-inner-struggle was concerned, Blodgett could not give a hoot. But jihad-as-holy-war appealed to him as a way of taking on his persecutors, and thus became the most important feature of the Blodgettist religion.
In The Book Of Blodgett, published in paperback the following year, it has to be said that the founder of the new religion makes an impeccably reasonable argument in favour of his faith. Having devised a set of laws - called Blodgettia - he announces that it is the duty of everyone on earth to obey them, or be killed. Taking his cue mainly from the Qu'ran and the Old Testament, Blodgett devised an appropriately illogical and arbitrary set of regulations for human behaviour. The list of laws is too long and abstruse to reproduce here, but a couple of examples will suffice.
"Blodgettia Law Number 12. Thou shalt not eat plums within ten yards of a pig or a goat or a starling. Those that disobey this law will be bundled up in sacking and thrown into a canal."
" Blodgettia Law Number 49. It is forbidden to wear your hat at other than a jaunty angle. See appendix for diagrams of angles of jauntiness and non-jauntiness. Officials of the Committee For The Promotion Of Blodgettian Virtue And The Wholesale Suppression Of Blodgettian Vice And Abomination, armed with protractors and tape measures, will fan out across the land, and where they find hats worn at non-jaunty angles they shall proceed to poke malefactors with pointy sticks before putting them to an entirely justifiable death."
Of course, the Prophet Mohammed - let's just take a look at that picture again, to remind ourselves -
As I was saying, the Prophet Mohammed was able to spread his word through a combination of historical and geographic circumstance and violence. Alas, Blodgettism never really took root, numbering perhaps only three or four devotees at its height, including Blodgett himself. But there are a few copies of The Book Of Blodgett which have not been pulped or thrown into dustbins, and they may yet inspire a new generation of fanatical adherents, who will demand, in big shouty voices, that they are right and every one else is wrong, and get very upset and angry if you disagree with them, and it will be your fault if they decide to blow you up or chop off your head. Be warned.
MONDAY 11th SEPTEMBER 2006
"On ships, attempts to melt the ice by buckets of hot water or by steam jets are only partially effective, because a great deal of heat is needed to melt a little ice. Further, if the temperature is still below freezing point when the operation is being carried out, the melted ice may freeze again unless it can be pushed overboard first. Mechanical detachment of the ice is no easy matter, for ice adheres most tenaciously to clean, grease-free surfaces and a ship has often been thoroughly de-greased by wind-swept rain and spray before it becomes iced-up." - G Van Praagh, De-Icing Of Ships
PILBROW TWO AND THE LOVE MONKEYS
The ever-vigilant Dr Ruth Pastry has fired off a letter in response to last Monday's item entitled Far Far Away.
Hail, Key!, she writes, My text for the day is Deuteronomy 25:13. "Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small." Before reading on, please check the contents of your bag to ensure you are following the Lord's commands. And before you ask, yes, of course I have checked my own bag, or rather bags, and I have nothing to fear from Jehovah, because everything in my bags is sorted according to weight.
Now, I want to take issue with this tale of a cardboard, wax and string Romeo and his (it's?) millions of unhatched love monkeys. I am not concerned that they are magnetic and mute and blind, simply that there are millions of them and only one of him, or it. For it seems to me that you are thereby condoning polygamy. Are you some kind of fundamentalist Mormon? You will object that the piece you wrote was fiction, or I suppose science fiction, but even so, you should not underestimate the effect of your twaddle on impressionable young minds… and impressionable older minds, too. I know that there are people out there who base their lives on the texts in Hooting Yard, people who aspire to be Dobsons or Tiny Enids, or even, god help us, Trebizondo Culpepers. What's to say some feckless pimply youth with one too many Asbos thinks he might reform his character by emulating Pilbrow Two? Just as you need to ensure you do not have divers weights in your bag, you ought to give more thought to the moral implications of your work.
Excuse me for a moment while I do my daily chant. Vad vod vud, vad vod vud, hoogoo, hoogoo, vad vod vud. There. I learned that chant from a rather unhygienic suburban shaman. He was very fond of making little plastic model aeroplanes, and he would sprinkle the completed kits with fairy dust, chanting as he did so. He had a different daily chant to mine, of course. I have to say that in all the years I have daily chanted the chant he allotted to me, I have not felt a smidgeon of benefit from doing so. I suspect my chant may be absolutely senseless.
Now where was I? Ah yes, I think you need to write more uplifting tales for your readers, ones with clear guidance as to one's conduct in daily life. You often write about pies, so why not write about piety? "The Pious Pie Shop Person", there's a title for you. Perhaps some orphans being led astray could come under the pious influence of the pie shop person. An evil demon may have persuaded the orphans to carry different weights, great and small, in their bags, thus disobeying the word of the Lord. Apprised of this foul abomination, the pious pie shop person would teach the tinies the error of their ways. A story like this would do much to repair your reputation, Mr Key. Think on it. Yours forever, Dr Ruth Pastry
Dr Pastry kindly attached a picture of some pious orphans to inspire us all:
MONDAY 4th SEPTEMBER 2006
"My blue potato is part of the cornucopia of potatoes developed by the Incas." - Michael Pollan, The Botany Of Desire
FAR FAR AWAY
Far, far away, there is a galaxy of shattered stars, stars crumpled and curdled and destitute, and there is a planet tucked in among these sorry stars, a tiny pink planet of gas and water and thick foliage, and tucked in among the fronds and creepers and enormous leaves of this foliage lie millions of unhatched eggs, and when they hatch they will hatch millions of magnetic mute blind love monkeys.
I am a crew member of the starship Corrugated Cardboard, heading implacably through deep space towards the galaxy of crumpled stars. Seven years into the voyage, only four of us remain from the original manifest of twenty. There is my captain, o my captain, Pilbrow, a hirsute, raving martinet. We have tied him with cords and confined him to a cupboard, for he has become impossibly dangerous. His spittle is sulphurous, it burns that which it touches, and as he raves, he spits, and he is never not raving, not any more. Ever since we passed through the belt of [illegible] Pilbrow seems no longer human. Being the science officer, I tried to study him, at first. Wearing big protective gloves I transferred flecks of his spittle into my alembic, and ignited my bunsen burners, and peered intently at Pilbrow's burning spittle, hoping to learn something. I learned nothing. We have travelled far, far beyond the belt of [illegible], and still I have learned nothing. Thus the binding with cords, and thus the cupboard.
Also surviving is Pilbrow Two, a half-size version of my captain, o my captain, made of cardboard, wax and string and animated with life by sparks of something akin to, but not quite, electricity. Pilbrow Two is indubitably alive, a pulsating, rustling, thinking, breathing thing, but it has nothing in common with the raving martinet tied by cords in the cupboard. At the beginning of the voyage, we considered changing its name, we even spent a few days calling it Unpilbrow or Antipilbrow, but neither of these caught on, possibly because Pilbrow Two would boom "My name is Pilbrow Two!" in its deafening voice. Our cardboard, wax and string crewmate has been invaluable in keeping our spirits up. I do not think we would still be heading for the galaxy of crumpled and destitute stars, and for the tiny pink planet, if it were not for his - her? its? - determination. Lumpen would have had us turn back, I am sure of it.
Lumpen is the other survivor. He has been morose and sullen since we ran out of breakfast cereal two years ago, after missing the supply depot on the Planet of Grocery Provisions Epsilon Six where we were due to collect a consignment of Kellogg's Fruit 'n' Fibre. He keeps to his bunk now, head buried in a metalback copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, his pipe clenched in his teeth, the fumes of his untreated Serbian tobacco hanging in the pseudo-air of the cabin. At least it kills the flies.
The bullet-riddled corpses of our dead crewmates, all sixteen of them, are coffined up and the coffins stacked as a makeshift ping pong table. We cleared a space in the cargo hold by jettisoning some crates of irrelevant rubbish we were meant to be delivering to one of the outlying mini-planets of Hubbardworld. There will be hell to pay if we ever get home, but home seems so far away now, so far, far away. Pilbrow Two is a superb ping pong player, never letting its bat get caught in its string, but I am better. We have played thousands of games over the years, and I have won nearly all of them, sometimes without losing a point. Because it has no heart, Pilbrow Two is not disheartened, and comes to every match with the same valiant perkiness that keeps us plunging ever further through space towards the galaxy of shattered stars.
One afternoon, after a particularly gruelling ping pong match, Pilbrow Two confessed to me that what kept it going, what kept it tweaking the boosters to increase our speed, even at the cost of sending the starship into judders which popped some of the bolts on the pseudo-air-seals, was that it was filled with a burning lust for the as yet unhatched magnetic mute blind love monkeys patiently awaiting birth on the tiny pink planet. This was the first I had heard of them. I became confused, and flung question after question at the half-size cardboard, wax and string simulacrum of my captain, o my captain, but it answered none of them. Instead, it showed me pages of twee love poetry it had been writing, and led me to a corner of the cargo hold where it had hidden a stash of love tokens - mostly things made out of some kind of tin, flowers and lockets and brooches, finicky bittybobs it was going to bestow upon the magnetic mute blind love monkeys once they were born. When I protested that there were, supposedly, millions of these monkeys, Pilbrow Two explained to me, with a winsome sigh, that its love knew no bounds, and nor did its lust, for when it had been programmed back in the lab that gave it life, a stray spark had imbued it with a superabundance of love, lust, and ping pong perkiness.
I wondered whether to share these revelations with Lumpen. But what would be the use? Patting Pilbrow Two on its cardboard head, I picked up my ping pong bat and challenged it to another game, and we played and played and played, as my captain, o my captain, Pilbrow, raved and spat and struggled with his binding cords in his cupboard, we played as Lumpen smoked his pipe and read Ayn Rand for the thousandth time, we played as the starship Corrugated Cardboard hurtled inexorably through space towards the galaxy of stars shattered and stars crumpled, stars curdled and stars destitute, wherein nestled the tiny pink planet of gas and water and thick foliage, wherein nestled millions of unhatched eggs, wherein nestled millions of unhatched magnetic mute blind love monkeys, awaiting their unlikely Romeo, a cardboard, wax and string simulacrum of my captain, o my captain, called Pilbrow Two, bearing poetry and love tokens, far, far away.
SATURDAY 2nd SEPTEMBER 2006
"The following is a list of lunar objects published in the Selenographical Journal : 0 deg. Black shadows. 1 deg. Darkest portions of the floors of Grimaldi and Riccioli. 1 1/2 deg. Interiors of Boscovich, Billy, and Zupus. 2 deg. Floors of Endymion, Le Monnier, Julius Caesar, Cruger, and Fourier a. 2 1/2 deg. Interiors of Azout, Vitruvius, Pitatus, Hippalus, and Marius. 3 deg. Interiors of Taruntius, Plinius, Theophilus, Parrot, Flamsteed, and Mercator. 3 1/2 deg. Interiors of Hansen, Archimedes, and Mersenius. 4 deg. Interiors of Manilius, Ptolemaeus, and Guerike. 4 1/2 deg. Surface round Aristillus, Sinus Medii. 5 deg. Walls of Arago, Landsberg, and Bullialdus. Surface round Kepler and Archimedes. 5 1/2 deg. Walls of Picard and Timocharis. Rays from Copernicus. 6 deg. Walls of Macrobius, Kant, Bessel, Mosting, and Flamsteed. 6 1/2 deg. Walls of Langrenus, Theaetetus, and Lahire. 7 deg. Theon, Ariadaeus, Bode B, Wichmann, and Kepler. 7 1/2 deg. Ukert, Hortensius, Euclides. 8 deg. Walls of Godin, Bode, and Copernicus. 8 1/2 deg. Walls of Proclus, Bode A, and Hipparchus c. 9 deg. Censorinus, Dionysius, Mosting A, and Mersenius B and c. 9 1/2 deg. Interior of Aristarchus, La Peyrouse DELTA. 10 deg. Central peak of Aristarchus." - Thomas Gwyn Elger, The Moon
ROSE GARDEN
I beg your pardon. I never promised you a rose garden. Go and look at the paperwork, where it is clearly stated that I promised you a ditch rife with puddles and nettles, teeming with tiny creatures, worms, flatworms, things with hundreds of legs and vibrating antennae, things with bulbous globular eyes and things with no eyes at all. It is also made crystal clear that this ditch is designed to surround your chalet, like a moat, and that no roses will grow in it. A towering hollyhock or two, yes, but not a single rose. Why on earth do you think that I promised you a rose garden?
How dare you accuse me of tampering with the papers! Are you seriously suggesting that I tippexed out whole paragraphs of the original and used a scratchy nib to insert a completely different schedule of works? You are casting aspersions upon my skills as a landscape designer of note and inferring that I am but a brute armed with a spade. I travelled the length and breadth of the country to find you specimens of the creepy crawlies you requested, rare maggots, weird blind wriggling transparent night crawlers, slithering horrors, and all the rest. There was no rainfall for weeks on end, so I created those puddles with my bare hands, carting bucket after bucket of duckpond water from the brackish duckpond over yonder beyond the municipal bandstand. It would have been a lot easier to plant a few roses in the ground, believe me.
Yes, I know you did not call me a brute with a spade, those were my words, but that is what you would have said were you a man of plain speech rather than a pompous puffed up milksop given to Jesuitical circumlocution. Has it occurred to you that your very verbosity may have contributed to you getting a ditch dug around your chalet instead of a rose garden? You could have said to me "I'd like a rose garden, please," and I would have taken that on board, but oh no, such simple language is not your style.
You did not say "I'd like a rose garden, please". I refute that utterly. If you had said that, why would I be clutching three files of paperwork which clearly show that you asked for a moat-like ditch rife with puddles and nettles and creeping creatures to be dug to a depth of six feet around your chalet, without any provision for a drawbridge? Do you think I just made that up off the top of my head? Why would I do that? Ditch digging is back-breaking work, especially when you only have one old rusty dented bent and battered spade to work with. Try it yourself.
There is no drawbridge straddling the ditch because you clearly specified that you did not require one. Yes, that did perplex me, but I assumed you were planning to vault the ditch on those long spidery legs of yours.
It is preposterous to argue now that you did not ask for a drawbridge because you would not need one to gain access to this putative rose garden you keep harping on about. Will you stop banging your fists on that portcullis?
Well… I will grant you that. It is indeed unusual to find a portcullis blocking the door of a chalet where there is no accompanying drawbridge. The two usually go together, I agree. And no, nowhere in the bundle of papers do you request the installation of a massive cast iron portcullis requiring the strength of ten muscular peasants to winch it up, which is why it does not come with a winch, or any kind of levers or pulleys or such contrivances. I am a landscapist, not an engineer.
If you recall, on the tenth day that the works were being carried out on your ditch, I told you that I would be unavailable on the following Thursday as I had to attend the presentation of a prize cup far, far away in a distant, cold, and mountainous land. Your immovable portcullis was installed in my absence, by rogues. It has nothing to do with me.
I have had quite enough of this. I am about to send my messenger starling to perch on your portcullis. Tuck the banknotes in the ring around its leg and flap your arms as a spur to send it back to me. If you do not do so, I am going to go and fetch my old rusty dented bent and battered spade and I will fill in your ditch. The puddles and the nettles and the teeming creeping creatures will vanish under piles of muck and mud and soil, and you will cut a forlorn figure, a Jesuitical milksop hammering on your portcullis, a man without a ditch.
THURSDAY 31st AUGUST 2006
“'Your allotted time has long since expired, Thol of Gharphut,' rasped a bulbous looking guard of the Garden of Mhersa, on Mars, eyeing my shocking nakedness with marked disapproval. 'Go at once to the Laboratory and make your report, then present yourself to the Grand Ghazza of the Supreme Interplanetary Council'." - Don Juan, Don Juan Visits The Planet Mars
TRUANT NOMENCLATURE
It is just over a year since the Hooting Yard Nomenclature Monitoring Panel alerted us to the sonorously-named Demi-Leigh Tweddle (see 22 August 2005). Now we have further proof that youthful Britons are being given startling monickers by their judicious parents.
A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian reported that a certain Mr & Mrs Haine had been sent to prison for four months because of their daughter's persistent truancy. And the name of the girl who won't go to school? Shlaine. Shlaine Haine. The couple's son is called Caine.
RADIO TRANSCRIPT
Here is a transcript of part of yesterday's Hooting Yard On The Air radio show. When the podcast becomes available, I shall add a link to it.
Regular listeners to Hooting Yard On The Air will know that I have been away for a couple of weeks. I wish I could say that I have been somewhere interesting - Aztec ruins, say, or the magic mountain, or even a chalet on the shingle beach at Pointy Town - but alas, I have been a pallid sickly wretch, suffering from risings in the spleen and the ague and black bile and the bloody flux and vapours in the cranial integuments. At times like these I tend to rely on the regular infusion of Baxter's Terrible Fluid, or Dr Gillespie's Vital Nerve Powders. The latter, sprinkled on to a plum or a conference pear, can work wonders on even the puniest constitution, and indeed, here I am back behind the microphone on a Wednesday afternoon, bringing the show to you live from the gleaming skyscraper which houses the ResonanceFM studio. Yes, I struggled my way through the weird pneumatic doors, I panted for breath as I staggered on to the moving walkway, there was a ringing in my ears as I slumped on the floor of the turbo-elevator which shot me to the top of the building in just four seconds, and I needed a bowl of energising vitamin soup before I could speak… but here I am, ready to provide you with half an hour of instructive prose to inspire your moral sentiments. Excuse me for a moment while I mop my still fevered brow.
There. Now, one consequence of lying abed groaning and whimpering in the throes of neurasthenic horrors is a disinclination to write. Some might choose to call this writer's block, or even idleness, but they know not whereof they speak. At least one acquaintance made this accusation in the past fortnight. As I tossed and turned in an agony of twitching fits, I became aware of a message on my metal tapping machine. Weakly, I reached for it, nearly falling from my rumpled pallet as I did so. And when I read the message, I was convulsed anew, as if ten thousand demons with ten thousand forks were pricking me ten thousand times.
"For crying out loud, Key!" I read through my tears, "Stop being such a milquetoast whinger. There is nothing wrong with you that a brisk walk around the duckpond in a hailstorm won't fix. Put on your boots and seize the day!"
I tossed my metal tapping machine on to the floor among the piles of rags, and sobbed. Some hours later, when I had stopped sobbing, I did indeed clamber from my sickbed, put on my boots, and I launched myself towards the duckpond. I got as far as the garden gate before collapsing in a mewling heap. I shuddered and shook, twitching and shattered, and hideous visions swam in my brain. I knew they were visions, because there are no giant golden poisonous toads in this neck of the woods, but still… even though I sensed they were the product of my fuming brain, they were frightening enough, particularly the one called Graham, which had more eyes than you normally see on a toad, even a giant golden poisonous toad, and each eye was quivering on the end of a stalk, which again is untoadlike, as far as I know, not that I have ever made a study of the world's toads, though it is on my list of Things to Do.
Anyway, there I was, cutting the opposite of a dash, when the postie bashed his way through the garden gate, clonking me on the head. The hallucinatory toads vanished, and I sat up on the gravel, rubbing the lump that was already swelling where I had been clonked.
"Oh, sorry I clonked you on the head," said the postie, "Here, I have a letter for you."
Even in the most trying of circumstances, I try to be polite, so as I took the envelope from the postie I thanked him. He recoiled from me, as if I had screeched some blasphemous execration, as indeed I had, for the clonk on my head had dislodged some of the nerve-wirings in my brain, and for the next three days whenever I spoke, whatever I tried to say, I spewed forth a tirade of foulness. Luckily a cure was affected before I had to do this show, otherwise ResonanceFM would be shut down by the authorities for broadcasting disgusting language in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, when innocent and sensitive ears would be appalled, and rightly so.
I was able to treat the dislodged brain-wiring by myself, for though I have neglected to learn about the toads of the world, I do know a thing or two about the magnificent complexity of the human brain. I had a good teacher. Years ago I attended a two-day course at the Blotzmann Institute, where I learned, among other things, that if you immerse your head in a bucket of warm soapy water and do the Culpeper Manoeuvres until at the point of drowning, most of your brain problems will be solved. It certainly works for me.
Now, where was I? I took the letter from the postie and crawled back into the house, somehow managing to hoist myself into a chair at the kitchen table. I did not like the look of the handwriting on the envelope. It spoke to me of theft, spasms, and cruelty. It spoke of moral turpitude. It spoke of rubber truncheons and contempt. You might ask how I could read so much into the few scribbled lines of my name and address, but I am not going to tell you. Instead, I am going to sulk while we have a short interval.
+ + +
That's better. I'll get back to how I overcame what might have been writer's block, or might have been something far more lethal, something almost too awful to contemplate, in a moment. But I want to mention that, in between recovering from my neurasthenic terrors and coming in to do today's show, I went to see the film Snakes On A Plane. Most of the critics have - with their customary laziness - made a big deal of Samuel L Jackson's line "I'm sick and tired of these beep-ing snakes on this beep-ing plane!", but for me there was a much better moment in the screenplay. One of the stewardesses enters the cockpit, where the co-pilot is trying to control the plane. (The captain has already been bitten by a poisonous snake.) She says: "What's with the oxygen mask deploying?" Now, put yourself in the scene. You are that stewardess. You are wondering why all the oxygen masks have been released, for no apparent purpose, so you go to the cockpit to find out. Come on now, think yourself into the situation. What do you say, what words come out of your mouth? "What's with the oxygen masks?" you might say, or at a push, "What's with the oxygen mask deployment?" But "What's with the oxygen mask deploying?" I think not. A great moment in a foolish but amusing film.
+ + +
So I sat at my table, glaring at this envelope with its repellent handwriting. I plucked a plum from my plum bowl, sprinkled it with Dr Gillespie's Vital Nerve Powders, took a bite, and glared at the envelope some more. I turned it over to see if there was a return address, and there was, but it was badly smudged and illegible. I cursed the postie. I flapped my arms, as if I were a bird, a big, legendary bird, like a roc. I pulled a piece of straw out of my hair. I pondered the implications of that anonymous 18th century suicide note which read, in its entirety, "All this buttoning and unbuttoning!" I couldn't remember if there was an exclamation mark appended to it, so I tottered to my feet and headed for the bookshelves whereon nestled a dictionary of quotations. I never made it across the room, because as I took a few unsteady steps I was confronted by a phantom. It may have been a ghoul, but I think it was a phantom. It was grey and ethereal and shimmering and damp and cold and mournful, and it was clutching in its slender bloodless hand the key to a hotel room. Through some kind of ghostly thought-transference, it told me that the hotel it belonged to was far away, in Winnipeg, and that I must go there immediately. I tried a bit of thought transference myself, to explain that my passport had expired and that I was too sick to go to Winnipeg in any case, but I made a botch of it, and transferred my thoughts not to the phantom but to a carpet beetle near the skirting board, which was so traumatised by being suddenly zapped with alien thought processes that it had a heart attack and perished, flipping on to its back and wiggling its many, many little legs hopelessly in the air. Can carpet beetles have heart attacks, or did I misread the signs? Who knows, apart from entomologists? What I do know is that the carpet beetle was dead and the phantom was still looming there, reproachful and anguished. It was, by the way, a Dutch phantom, a Rotterdam phantom, one of the phantoms of Rotterdam. What was it doing in my house? Why was it imploring me to go to a hotel in Winnipeg? What awaited me in the hotel room? I tried to remove a sliver of plum peel that was caught in my teeth, without success. The Rotterdam phantom shifted suddenly, spine-tinglingly. Now it was behind me. I span around. The phantom was dissolving, slowly, but it had left the Winnipeg hotel key on the mantelpiece.
I opened a window. From my neighbour's house I could hear the strains of "20 Great TV Themes" by the Dennis Drivel Accordion And Pan-Pipe Orchestra. I realised it was the limited edition version, including the theme from "It Shouldn't Happen To A Vet". My head cleared. Everything seemed to fall into place. I had been sick, but now I was well. I flapped my arms again, like wings, but not like the wings of a legendary bird like a roc. I flapped my arms as if they were angel's wings, and I was being borne to heaven, and I took the dead carpet beetle with me, for why should insects not share in the rapture of paradise?
TUESDAY 8th AUGUST 2006
"Who alive, for instance, knows all the moles of Sussex? I confess I got my first sight of one a few days ago, and, though I had seen dead moles hanging from trees and had read descriptions of moles, the living creature was as unexpected as if one had come on it silent upon a peak in Darien." - Robert Lynd, The Pleasures Of Ignorance
SOME DEATH NOTICES
I ran across a selection of 19th century death notices from a Michigan newspaper. Here are a few for your perusal:
Thursday, May 12, 1887 Mrs. Chas. Martin, wife of a farmer living near Grand Rapids, poisoned herself and two of her children on the 3d, with "rough on rats."
Thursday, May 12, 1887 A terrible accident occurred in the rolling mill of the Hubbard Iron company, at Hubbard, Ohio, shortly after 2 o'clock on the morning of the 6th. Engineer Griffith Phillipps, aged 29 years, in passing around the ore crusher oiling the bearings, was caught in the wheels and dragged into the crusher. He was mangled out of all semblance of humanity, the flesh adhering to the clogs. He leaves a wife and 3 children.
Thursday, June 2, 1887 At Canton, Ohio, last week, Charles Danseizen, a bricklayer, went home drunk and, picking up a butcher-knife six inches long, murdered his wife by stabbing her in the throat. He says she drove him to the deed because she joined the Salvation Army.
Thursday, November 24, 1887 It is said on the street that Miss Ida Carew, who mashed the patrons of the variety theatre by her song, "You can't do it, you know", died at New Orleans lately.
Saturday, April 14, 1888 Miss Metta Fordham, of Bronson, a music teacher and exceedingly bright young lady, died with measles. When the disease first seized her she told her friends she would never get well.
Saturday, May 12, 1888 John Winter, who died recently at Grand Rapids, is alleged to have said with his dying breath that his wife poisoned him. The woman and her neighbors agree that he died of dissolute habits.
SONG OF THE GRUNTY MAN
Apparently, the Grunty Man, that figure of childhood nightmares, has a song. It begins:
I grunt at the sun, I grunt at the moon, my grunts do not follow a tune. I grunt at the stars, I grunt at the sky, my grunting makes household pets die.
One day in March 1967, the Grunty Man went into a recording studio. He was accompanied by a hand-picked gaggle of musicians who later became some of the biggest names in prog rock, including future members of Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and Spooky Tooth. Also present was the youthful Gordon Sumner, now known to the world as 'Stig' [sic], who was drafted in for his ability to whine in a high-pitched caterwaul. I say they were hand-picked, but in fact the Grunty Man arranged for each muso to be plucked from their mundane doldrums by the Claw of Gack. It was an experience none of them ever forgot.
Eschewing the use of a producer or sound engineer, the Grunty Man barred and bolted the studio doors and whirled about in a grunting frenzy until all the musicians were suitably cowed. It would be unkind to state which of the ELP trio was so frightened that he hid in a cupboard and piddled in his loon pants until coaxed out with the promise of garibaldi biscuits.
Ten thousand years old and covered in sores, the Grunty Man had recently started to use a guide dog. This dog, Alan, was some kind of beagle, and was hopelessly inadequate for its task. It was blind itself, in one eye, suffered from muscle spasms and liver failure, and harboured a doggy desire to take part in the space programme rather than have to drag around with the Grunty Man. It spent most of the recording session curled up inside Carl Palmer's bass drum, dreaming of the stars.
The Grunty Man decided to call his one-off band Ruddiman's Rudiments, after the Latin primer used by generations of schoolchildren. With such a name, he thought, he would not be dismissed merely as a grotesque grunting ogre from the earth's primeval past, but as a somewhat more sophisticated being. Having a hit record would give him even more charisma, and his long-cherished desire to win social acceptance would be fulfilled. Perhaps he wanted too much.
Certainly the auspices were not good, as the band huddled in a corner of the studio quaking with terror, Alan snoozed, and no one bothered to locate the light switches. When little Sumner whimpered that they would need at least some light to work by, the Grunty Man unleashed great bellows of his sulphurous, phosphorescent breath. The studio was lit by a dim green mist which hung in the air, and the band stumbled reluctantly to their positions. They ran through the music a few times, but never to the Grunty Man's satisfaction.
"Less Herman's Hermits! More Scriabin!" he shouted, and as they could not understand his grunts, he clawed the words onto the walls with his talons. But none of the band, not even the bombastically-inclined future Emerson Lake & Palmer, were familiar with the works of the Russian composer*, and they stuck to a toothsome sort of pop pap. The Grunty Man kept bellowing to maintain the phosphorescent light levels. Alan woke up briefly and savaged Carl Palmer's piddle-stained loon pants. And then a janitor arrived.
The janitor, Old Ted Cargpan
Old Ted Cargpan's intention was to throw the intruders out of the studio. In the event, he saved the situation. Completely calm in the face of the hideous Grunty Man, and contemptuous of the young musicians, he at once sized up the scene, set the tapes running, and put the whole lot of them through their paces. Even the Grunty Man deferred to the janitor, retreating to a spot up in the rafters and allowing the little Sumner boy to take on the lead vocal, while Alan the guide dog, refreshed after his nap, howled backing. The instrumentalists, too, seemed energised by the crusty old janitor's presence, Greg Lake in particular demonstrating the sort of skills that would, in a few years time, make Brain Salad Surgery such a millstone. Sorry, I meant to type 'milestone'.
The track finished, Old Ted Cargpan sent the musicians packing and brought the Grunty Man down from his perch near the ceiling to record the B-side, a duet with Alan the guide dog. The Grunty Man grunted, Alan slobbered, and the janitor moulded their din into a majestic three minute miniature rock opera, subsequently plagiarised by everybody from Ultravox to swan-eating Peter Maxwell Davies.
So whatever happened to the recordings? Some say that the adult Gordon Sumner, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice but still, as a middle-aged man, calling himself 'Stig', opposed any reissue of the disc and even had the master tapes destroyed. Another rumour has it that Alan the guide dog somehow managed, in 1977, to get himself blasted towards Saturn on a space rocket, and took the tapes with him. The Grunty Man himself remains silent on the subject, merely grunting horribly in his cave, or next to his pond, haunting the nightmares of tiny children, tuneless once more, and resigned to his immortal fate.
*NOTE : For more about puny neurasthenic Alexander Scriabin and his tiny hands, see 29th January 2006.
FRIDAY 4th AUGUST 2006
"It is an easy matter for any sane man or woman to understand why an immoral priest, and one who has no regard for honour, has such an easy task in accomplishing the ruin of those whom he seeks to destroy. The paradise of the priestcraft is inky darkness, as they prefer darkness to light, and by their actions, their everyday lives take on the hue of midnight." - Bernard Fresenborg, Thirty Years In Hell
DAYS O' BOOTPOLISH
It was in the Days o' Bootpolish that I was banished from the palace. I had done nothing wrong, but one Thursday morning they came for me in my cubicle and tore the paperwork from my elegant hands and told me that I was to be banished. I was led to a cupboard where I was told to deposit my pencils and my hats, and then to another cupboard where there were many, many shelves stacked oh so high with packets of nuts. They told me I could take six packets, two each of peanuts and hazelnuts, one of pine nuts and one of brazil nuts. I was to cram them into my pockets and pat the flaps down. It was made very clear to me that my pockets would be rummaged through as I stepped outside the palace to begin my banishment, and that if I had more than six packets of nuts about my person, banishment from the palace would be the least of my worries. It was not entirely clear to me what this meant, but it was not meant to be clear to me, it was intended that I be stricken with terror and have my imagination run riot at the prospect of some gruesome fate. In truth, I did not get myself into a little flap, for I have always been law-abiding, and I had no intention of taking more than my allotment of nuts. I have twice mentioned flaps, material flaps and emotional flaps, and before I am through I may refer to other flaps. We shall see.
Once I had packed my pockets with my six packets of nuts and patted down the flaps, they told me to come out of the cupboard, and as soon as I was in the corridor they slammed the cupboard door shut with such unnecessary violence that I jumped into the air for a second. The ceiling was high enough that I did not crack my head on it. I understood why they had instructed me to pat down my pocket flaps, because had I not done so, one or more of the packets of nuts may have fallen from my pockets during my inadvertent little jump. I got the impression, waiting for their next move, that they had expected me to jump.
Around the corner of the corridor one of them now appeared, wheeling a gurney. They told me to clamber on to it and to lie down on my back, and then they strapped me to it with a series of buckled woolen belts. It was explained to me that this was all part of the standard banishment procedure and that I should read nothing sinister into it, so I didn't. I felt quite relaxed, staring at the grimy yellow ceiling of the corridor as I was wheeled along. I mused about the Days o' Bootpolish, and wondered if they were coming to an end. It was hard to tell.
First howler monkey
We arrived at a junction and turned into another corridor. This one had a ceiling that was also yellow, but much less grimy. After a while my gurney juddered to a stop, I was unbuckled, and they told me to get off it and stand up. I did as I was told, and saw that I was in a part of the palace that I had never seen before, but this did not surprise me, for I always knew that I was kept to only certain areas of what must have been a tremendously large building. Now I was going to be thrown out of it altogether, with six packets of nuts to see me on my way. I did find this all very curious, but they showed no sign of giving me any explanation, so I kept my mouth shut.
There was a cold rush of air to my left, and I looked around and saw that a sliding door had swooshed open, and beyond it was open air, a field, some shrivelled vegetation, distant cows, and a magnificent blue sky. I had not seen the like since before the Days o' Bootpolish, and for the first time since they ejected me from my cubicle I spoke.
"Gosh," I said.
One of them whacked me on the windpipe with a tally stick, and I crumpled to the floor. My patted-down pocket flaps kept my six packets of nuts safe from spillage. It took me some while to get my breath back, and then they lifted me to my feet. I heard an ungodly beeping noise. This was coming from a wall-panel which formed part of the stupendously complicated palace communication system, installed at the very beginnings of the Days o' Bootpolish, when inventions were still welcomed. I knew it ran on electricity and pneumatics, but beyond that its workings were a mystery to me. The beeping turned out to be a signal confirming my banishment. They turned out my pockets, and as soon as they were satisfied that I was carrying no more than six packets of nuts, I was shoved in the small of the back, out into the field, and the sliding door swooshed shut behind me.
Second howler monkey
I walked away from the palace, in more or less a straight line, for about an hour. Then the sky was filled suddenly with dozens of Swordfish jet planes with military markings, dozens of planes, skitting and swooping, making a terrible din. I clapped my elegant hands over my equally elegant ears to stifle the racket, without much success. While I was standing there being a bit weedy, one of the planes came into land about fifty cements away and disgorged a troop of howler monkeys, who immediately came charging towards me, howling and howling. They grabbed my arms and legs, lifted me off my feet, bundled me into a tarpaulin, and carried me off towards the plane. I noticed a solitary starling in the blue sky.
Once inside the plane, which took off again as soon as I had been ferried aboard, I was tossed from the tarpaulin onto a surprisingly comfortable bunk and injected with a serum. This gave me a splitting headache but also caused me to begin babbling in urgent and breathless gulping sobs everything I knew about the palace and the Days o' Bootpolish. I couldn't stop myself, even when one of the howler monkeys passed me a tumbler of refreshing milkshake. I ended up spitting most of it onto the floor, so desperate was I to tell everything I could dredge up from the deepest nooks of my brain. It was all quite involuntary. None of the howler monkeys was taking notes, in fact they did not seem particularly interested in what I had to tell. I prattled on for at least a day, if not more, before falling back on the bunk completely spent. They gave me some more milkshake, and this time I drained my tumbler with lip-smacking relish. Then I fell asleep.
That was last week. This week, the howler monkeys have asked me to help them to make a scale model of the palace out of corrugated cardboard. I will give them what help I can. I have already given them the six packets of nuts that were the tokens of my banishment. The Days o' Bootpolish are over now, at long last, and I for one will not miss them. I have enough on my plate, ushering in the Days o' Cellophane to a colony of a hundred thousand howler monkeys, learning to howl just like them, but perhaps with a touch more elegance.
Third howler monkey
THURSDAY 3rd AUGUST 2006
"He who begins with crutches will generally end with crutches... The world is full of human lobsters." - John L Huelshof, Reading Made Easy For Foreigners
A FURTHER NOTE ON PIGS
Yesterday I made passing mention of Popsy The Pig, and I have been asked to point out that said pig is a fictional pig rather than a real, living, breathing pig of flesh and blood. One might think this was obvious. Not so, as far as serial Hooting Yard correspondent Dr Ruth Pastry is concerned.
O Key! she writes, in yet another frantically typed missive from wherever it is she lives, I have been concerned for some time that you do not make plain what is fact and what is fiction. We all know that educational standards are falling apart, that tinies today are sent to "community education hubs" rather than schools, and that they learn nothing because the blinkered nitwits who oversee things are far too busy rolling out and embedding robust initiatives and driving forward 360-degree change interfaces under the direction of a faith-based challenge champion. These are the kind of people, remember, who see an arrow and call it a "graphic directional pointing emblem". Regrettable though it is, you need to bear in mind that your future readership will need explicit guidance to distinguish a pretend pig from a real one. To apprehend the full import of your words, readers have to be absolutely clear what you are talking about. It goes without saying that they need to have confidence that you know what you're talking about in the first place. It does sometimes seem to me that you have about as much idea about real pigs as you do about birds. In future I suggest that you use some kind of colour coding system. Plain black text for facts, red italics for things you have made up, and bold green type for when you are wittering on about the many, many subjects of which you are profoundly ignorant. That should sort the wheat from the chaff, and I suspect there will be a huge amount of chaff. Yours in Christ, Ruth Pastry (Dr).
Entertaining though such rants may be, I have no intention of taking Dr Pastry's advice. Unlike her, I respect my readers' intelligence, and I think it unlikely that anyone would confuse the fictional Popsy-with-a-'y' The Pig and the real Popsie-with-an-'i'-and-an-'e' The Pig. The latter pig was, of course, enstyed in the grounds of the pneumatic power tower on the other side of the fields beyond the Big Unexplained Building On The Hill, where it was regularly visited by Dobson, who fed it with an enticing variety of fallen fruits and items of confectionery. Though he pretended a convincing gruffness, Dobson had a soft spot for Popsie The Pig, who could reduce him to tears by, for example, grunting, or wallowing in a particular patch of mud. In the autumn of 1955, Dobson trudged across the fields to the pig sty twice a day, his pockets filled with pig treats for Popsie.
It was on one such trudge, a dawn one, as winter began to bite, that the out of print pamphleteer was accosted by the local Inspector Of Pig, Squirrel, And Goat Food, with his pointy cap and gleaming golden blazer buttons.
"My name is Piccolo, and my mind is a chaos," said this man, pointing a futuristic ray gun at Dobson's head, "And I am the local Inspector Of Pig, Squirrel, And Goat Food. My word is law in these parts. Empty your pockets."
Dobson had been threatened with ray guns before, but never at dawn in the middle of a field, so reluctantly he did as he was bid, tossing fallen fruits and items of confectionery on to the ground. A partly-gnawed toffee apple struck the boot of the Inspector and rolled into a ditch.
"Get into the ditch and retrieve that partly-gnawed toffee apple," shouted the Inspector, waving his ray gun in a haphazard way that betrayed his unfamiliarity with it. Dobson ducked and shimmied and swiftly disarmed him, dislodged his pointy cap and pushed him into the ditch.
"My ankle is sprained," whined the Inspector.
Dobson eyed him with contempt and picked up the fallen fruits and items of confectionery one by one.
"Listen to me, Inspector Of Pig, Squirrel, And Goat Food, or whoever you are," said Dobson, "I am going to continue trudging across the field until I reach the pig sty. Then I will feed these fallen fruits and items of confectionery to the pig known throughout this land as Popsie The Pig. That is Popsie with an 'i' and an 'e', a real pig of flesh and blood and bone and muscle, no mere fictional pretend pig of someone's fancy. Fictional pigs need no feeding, Inspector, as your superiors must have made plain to you when they handed you a requisition slip for that futuristic ray gun and sent you here. While I am gone, eat of that partly-gnawed toffee apple, and fill in your forms. When I return, I will fashion a makeshift stretcher out of branches and leaves, and I will drag you across the fields to my home, and I will install you on the sofa in the sitting room, and I will feed you with more toffee apples, and with soup, until your sprained ankle is sprained no more, and then you may go on your way, armed once more with your ray gun, with your pointy cap set straight upon your head, and your pockets stuffed with certain of my pamphlets which you are to bring to the attention of your superiors, works in which I have addressed in enormous detail the topic of the proper feeding of not only pigs, and squirrels, and goats, but also cows and horses and stoats and crows and weasels and cormorants and guillemots and badgers, both real and fictional. The overwhelming genius of my recommendations has been ignored until now, and this has caused me anguish that you can barely imagine from your position sprawled in a ditch with a sprained ankle and only a partly-gnawed toffee apple for sustenance. But you will do me this service, and by doing so your name will live forever in the hearts of those who, from St Francis of Assisi onwards, have striven to strengthen the links that bind us to the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and those creatures that creep upon their bellies, and those that slither and wriggle in the muck, the real ones and those that are fictional, like Popsy The Pig when Popsy is spelled with a 'y'. It is you who will be remembered, Inspector, not me, for I am but a mere out of print pamphleteer. I have no pointy cap, as you do, nor a blazer with gleaming golden buttons, nor do I covet them. Mark my words, and mark them well. And now I must trudge onward to the pig sty."
Alas, when Dobson returned to the ditch, the Inspector Of Pig, Squirrel, And Goat Food had scarpered. He had only ever been a phantom from another world and another time, and as Dobson threw the futuristic ray gun into a nearby waste chute, he realised with a mixture of despair and disgust that his words had been wasted, and that when he got home, as the bleak winter sun rose higher in the sky, he would find those pamphlets which addressed in enormous detail the proper feeding of pigs and squirrels and goats and cows and horses and stoats and crows and weasels and cormorants and guillemots and badgers, both real and fictional, still lying unread in the drawer of his writing desk, and he had no one to give them to, no one to carry them away, far away, to distant buildings in distant lands where important people made important decisions about the feeding of Popsie The Pig and all the other creatures upon this planet that Carl Sagan called a pale blue dot.
WEDNESDAY 2nd AUGUST 2006
"...went to the most best museum this side of the Pitt Rivers (a woven pram next to an altar, proudly displayed old soap, a beehive cooler, an array of shoe moulds, two copies of 'Veneering And Its Possibilities')..." - Ric Morris and John Gower, in a letter from Australia to Jonathan Coleclough
MANSFIELD
Fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol won fame as a sprinter, and it is not commonly known that he was also a champion player of mansfield. It is likely that his cantankerous trainer, Old Halob, kept this quiet, for mansfield is a brutal and dangerous contact sport played with agricultural shovels. It is also illegal.
To the untrained eye, a mansfield match is indistinguishable from a whirling tangle of peasants smashing each other in the face with their shovels. Jaws get broken, blood flows from head-wounds, eyes are put out, and all sorts of other head injuries are the inevitable result of a well-fought tie. There is a lot of shouting, and a lot of groaning and howling in agony. Volunteer ambulance services are usually on hand, and keen young medical students offer triage at the side of the pitch.
It is the pitch itself that tells us we are witnessing a proper sport, with codes and rules, and not just a fight in a muddy field, and it is the form of the pitch which explains why the sport is called mansfield. As with other sports, the rules developed gradually, and for many years mansfield was little more than an excuse for roaming bands of countryside persons to bash each other about with shovels, spades, hoes and rakes. Often it seems that games resulted from rivalry between one farm and another, or were a way of settling disputes about hedges, duckponds, and hen coops.
Legend has it that a passing fortune teller one day watched a particularly violent brawl in which over a hundred peasants were embroiled, a fight so blood-drenched that vultures circled overhead, and carrion crows swept in from the west. Unusually for a magus for whom the stars in the firmament were as simple to read as an infant's story about Popsy The Pig, the fortune teller had a passion for bureaucracy. As much as he could appreciate the celestial order of the universe, he was equally, if not more, concerned with the lower level order of rules and timetables and regulations, often arbitrary and senseless. They had their own beauty for him, and he was a very mundane magus.
So it was that, watching toothless and mud-begrimed peasants whacking each other brainless with a jumble of different farm implements, the fortune teller saw what no one else could see. He peered into the future and saw an organised sport, still a brutal, impassioned fight, but one which would adhere to a coherent system, a sport like lacrosse or water polo or, his favourite, ping pong. The mundane magus sat down on a tuffet of spurge and rummaged in his magus-bag, pulling out an astrological birth chart for the writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923). Its central circle showed a number of lines, crosses, squares and triangles, in green and red, which struck him as the perfect pitch-markings for the sport he foresaw, and are of course now familiar to mansfield aficionados in rural backwaters across the globe, wherever the game is played. On the back of the chart, he scribbled down with a thumbelina pencil a swathe of rules, ditching all farm implements but the shovels, insisting that each side be limited to forty players apiece, sketching the Katherine Mansfield bob-wigs they must all wear at the starting whistle, and adding such enticing details as the offside rule and the so-called Pantsil gambit.
Intriguingly, the magus was busy on his tuffet codifying the rules of the game on the very day in October 1922 that Katherine Mansfield fetched up at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, where she was hoping to find treatment for the tuberculosis that was killing her. And she did find treatment, for Gurdjieff, the one time carpet salesman and ridiculous old fraud, had her chopping up carrots in the middle of the night and sleeping, when he allowed her to sleep, in a loft above the cow-barn, reasoning that the heady stench of gathered cows would benefit her. She was dead by January.
By another uncanny coincidence, she died on the day that the mundane magus blew a whistle to begin the first ever mansfield tournament where the game was played in its modern form. In the final, the Blister Lane Gaggle o' Peasantry beat the Pang Hill Orphanage Groundsmen convincingly, with a tally of forty three broken bones to six, more than double the bloodshed when measured in pails, and three players' entrails eaten by vultures as opposed to twelve.
Next week we will be looking at various tactical tips, including the notorious double-shovel to the windpipe, and how the top teams limber up for a needle match by reading Katherine Mansfield's In A German Pension aloud, huddled around a gas stove on a wild winter night.
Katherine Mansfield
* THE COMPLETE HOOTING YARD ARCHIVE *
JULY 2006 : The Pointy Town Seabird Rescue Service, zonk-eyed boffins, clanging bells, Jethro Tull, Anthony Burgess, and the unspeakably squalid becrumplement of an unlikely fictional character. All this and more awaits the diligent archive-reader.
JUNE 2006 : Much to inspire the attentive reader, including anagrams of Tord Grip, some mad Arabs H P Lovecraft neglected to mention, fiends of the farmyard, the attempted seduction of Dobson by a floozie, and Men With Whisks!
MAY 2006 : Twenty billion years of apocalyptic ballyhoo, a howling dog in a rowing boat, a consumptive shoemaker, and a gratuitous lawnmower illustration.
APRIL 2006 : An embittered sludge person, Arnold Bax, how to check that the Pope is dead, potato clocks, obnosis, Dutch gruel ... what more could you ask for?
MARCH 2006 : A cow called Ultravox (really), weird cooing, Basil and Guido from Dr Blodgett's Terpsichorean Academy For Keen Young Chaps, fear eats the soul, and a cranky pagan pudding recipe. And much more besides. Take a packed lunch.
FEBRUARY 2006 : A thoroughly exciting month, packed with delights including Bucephalus and the cephalopods in the Bosphorus, a decoy duck, plastic baubles and plastic sheeting, the anniversary of the 1958 Munich Air Disaster, custard, buttercups, specks in the sky, and tips on saving your swan in the event of a bird flu pandemic.
JANUARY 2006 : The new year begins with a series of unfortunate cows, stunned starlings, Rex Harrison and his son Noel, a Lembit Opik lookalike, and Sago the Pang Hill orphan. Oh, and a pontificating fruitarian.
DECEMBER 2005 : A Christmas treat in the shape of two episodes from Blodgett And His Pals Hanging Around On A Mysterious Island After Surviving A Plane Crash.
NOVEMBER 2005 : Mr Key has a lie down and adds not a jot to the site.
OCTOBER 2005 : Learn everything you need to know about the shelling of peas, the Magic Mountain, Ayn Rand's funeral song, English composer William Hurlstone, and the giant terrifying mountains of Tantarabim.
SEPTEMBER 2005 : Zeigler and Locke, wisps and clumps, the magnificent Ukrainian bee counting game, and a picture of a stormy petrel are among this month's undoubted highlights.
AUGUST 2005 : Read all about hendiadys in Mudchute, Reginald Bosanquet, The Bog People by P V Glob, the smashed god, a dream about Roy Kinnear, cows, blubber, tallow and tin... and not to forget the darning-needle of destiny!
JULY 2005 : The Bilgewater Elegies, the debut of fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, homage to Bernard Cribbins, calor gas, larder tips, Jesus, cake news, and a fop in a quandary. Who could ask for more?
JUNE 2005 : So much to read that you may get an attack of the vapours. Lusty jocund swains, the bottomless viper-pit of Gaar, dispatches from O'Houlihan's Wharf, wafers, woods and killer bees, among much else.
MAY 2005 : Back after a break, and what delights! Learn about the ancient mystic art of Goon Fang, toasted blob-cake, a grebe, swans, fluttering sociopathic moth-beings, trumpets and banners, and lightning rods.
APRIL 2005 : Radio silence.
MARCH 2005 : No bulletins from Hooting Yard.
FEBRUARY 2005 : Such an exciting month at Hooting Yard that Mr Key had to go and lie down for two months, hence the absence of any entries for March and April. Here you can read about bags in the Bible, Rasputin, moths, the Electric Prunes, Muggletonians, haruspices, and both Tiny Enid and Serpentine Claude.
JANUARY 2005 : We enter the new year with Anubis and Ra, pageantry and ice, Saint Mungo and Agent Hosty, pit vipers on postage stamps, the glove of Ib, The Anatomy Of Melancholy, and the Hooting Yard Gallery Of Goo!
DECEMBER 2004 : Hooting Yard reaches its first birthday and celebrates with tales of wild pigs, vampire bats and days of imbecilic glee, as well as looking at the crucial importance of topiary, the legend of the Grunty Man, the Swiss Family Robinson, and, of course, what happened when Björn and Benny and Anni-Frid and Agnetha were invited to Belshazzar's feast... Gosh!
NOVEMBER 2004 : includes a note about a rare edition of the Bible, unanswered questions about JFK, my little blind dolly and my little blind crow, a picture of a big black beetle, two pictures of locusts, and all sorts of other magnificently entertaining material for all the family.
OCTOBER 2004 : a cornucopia of delights, including Dobson in the Biblical Land of Nod, railings and pewter, Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis, bees, chewed things, Richard Nixon, Emily Dickinson and Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp, paper crumpling, and Tex-Mex Jiffy Bag Sprites!
SEPTEMBER 2004 : the return of Mrs Gubbins, Dobson's fear of squirrels, Christopher Plummer as Atahualpa, bean diseases, a horrible cave, and a selection of 18th century newspaper headlines, together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alexander Graham Bell & Ringo Starr...
AUGUST 2004 : all about celery, gutta percha, neurasthenic shuddering, egg flip, the old town of Plovdiv, bags of suet, and papal infallibility. Plus starlings and terrifying moles, among much else.
JULY 2004 : is there any subject we didn't address in July? Tundism, owls, Ricardo Montalban, glue and gruel and God and hydraulics and tsars and bogs, Emily Dickinson, botched trepanning operations, curd, birds, mucilage, balm in Gilead, and of course an enormously useful Pontiff mnemonic.
JUNE 2004 : the definitive return from Technonightmareland! June brought mentions of gnats, Nixon, nuns purporting to be from Finland, little Severin the mystic badger, Ronald Reagan, Belt, Bong & Yaw and at least 44 curlews.
MAY 2004 : still bedevilled by technical trauma, we nevertheless managed to address such issues as "Was Dobson Stalin?", examine the legacy of Tuesday Weld, ponder Frank's future as the Face of L'Oreal, and sigh at the strange fate of the Besmirched & Bonkers Topiary Man, His Hoodoo & Collapse. All this plus croissants, horses, Stendahl on peas, ogres, vapours and, of course, even more cormorants.
APRIL 2004 : a month which saw hideous and traumatic computer nightmares at Hooting Yard. Despite this, you'll be able to read about Mrs Gubbins and her infatuation with buttons, a noodlehead in peril, Sopwith's so-called "marsh gas years", and the disgusting bilge of Cadet Vig, among other things.
MARCH 2004 : a bumper month - not only the seven dwarves, the administration of lighthouses, and six cows and a bee, not only Chutney On My Spats by Beerpint & How I Invented A Revolutionary New Birdseed by Dobson, but soup, cake, gluttony, Chewism, jars, cormorants and a leech mishap.
FEBRUARY 2004 : including Richard Milhous Nixon, bismuth & titanium, Istvan & Zoltan, Dobson, badgers, potatoes, pails, James Joyce, and a burlap sack of old crocuses.
JANUARY 2004 : including World o' Cake, decoy ducks, the Crogsnickplagg Cow Centenary, penguin brain scans, and other amusing diversions.
DECEMBER 2003 : including the Ship of Fools, Monomaniac Time, a crumpled map, the Buttons of Beb, and much, much more!
NOVEMBER AUDUBON BIRD OF THE MONTH COMPETITION
Identify this bird from Audubon's Birds of America and you have a chance to win something or other. Probably a biro. Send your entries to hooting.yard@googlemail.com, with the subject header I know what this bird is, it's a... The winner will be randomly selected on 30th November 2006.
The editor's decision is final. Last month's winner won a packet of boiled sweets.
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