Hooting Yard

Did you know that Babinsky, the infamous walrus-moustached serial killer, had an idiot half-brother? This chap – who for the sake of convenience we shall call Babinsky 2 – was officially classified as a “type four cretin” under the official idiot classification system obtaining at that time, in that land, under that regime. I am afraid I don’t know how many numbered types of cretin there were, nor of the nature and number of other idiot types, and I have only been able to ascertain Babinsky 2’s official classification after years and years of fossicking about in mouldy archives, at grave peril to my physical and mental health. That is why I walk with a stick and hold what I delude myself are coherent conversations with birds including linnets and partridges.

As a type four cretin, Babinsky 2 was considered to be a peculiarly high-functioning idiot, deemed suitable for such tasks as using a pointy stick to gather litter from verdant parkland, mopping up filth in long corridors, sitting in a tent outside a cathedral, and writing opinion pieces for The Guardian. Unfortunately, due to fuddled bureaucracy, several doctors had instead recommended that the most effective treatment for him, at that time, in that land, under that regime, was to be chained up in a cellar and fed, very occasionally, on slops, or, if that option was not available, to be chained up in an attic and fed, very occasionally, on pap. Such, then, was his plight in the dying days of the corrupt and despicable reign of the double kings Umberto and Ignatz.

Babinsky himself, walrus-moustached and lumbering and psychotic, knew nothing of his idiot half-brother’s fate. They had been parted since they were tiny, if one can for a moment imagine a tiny Babinsky. Yet like us all, the blood-drenched nutcase was once an innocent babe-in-arms, rocked in a cradle and sung to by his mama, though perhaps we ought not examine too closely the words of the songs that good woman sang to him, nor indeed their tunes, if tunes they can be called, for it is probable that it was those very songs, or hideous caterwauls, that laid the eggs of crime within his brain. She did not sing to Babinsky 2.

Their parting happened, unexpectedly, during a family picnic, at a site of bucolic glory, when Babinsky was three and Babinsky 2 was two. There was a sudden thunderstorm. Mama was struck by lightning. A wolf carried Babinsky off into the woods. His idiot half-brother was left behind, drooling on the picnic blanket, deafened by jet fighters swooping low overhead, and by thunder, until he was gathered up and swaddled in the picnic blanket and borne away by a passing widow-woman. Old Mother Sebag-Montefiore had been reduced to penury since the death of her husband in one of King Umberto’s insane wars, or possibly in one of King Ignatz’s sane ones, and she conceived the idea of selling the child. At that time, in that land, under that regime, they had a primitive version of eBay, so she took a snapshot the idiot tot and posted it and waited for bids to come in. All we know now is that at least one bid must have been made, for Babinsky 2 was indeed sold. To whom, and for what sum, we know not, and all trace of him is lost until he turns up, some thirty or forty or, god help us, fifty years later, chained up in a cellar or an attic by dint of bureaucratic fuddle.

At which point his criminal half-brother Babinsky reenters the scene. The double kingdom is on its last legs. Umberto is spending more and more of his time, like Baruch Spinoza, pitting spiders against each other in combat. Ignatz has taken to obsessive annotation of back numbers of the Reader’s Digest. Every day, entire flocks of birds are dropping dead out of the sky, and wherever one looks the potatoes are blighted. The land is descending into a state of anarchy, an ideal playground for a villain like Babinsky. No doubt, on that fateful March morning, cavorting with the wolves in the woods, he was plotting further and ever more heinous enormities. But then word reached him, via the primitive version of spam email prevalent at that time, in that land, under that crumbling regime, that his idiot half-brother, Babinsky 2, was languishing, chained up in a cellar or an attic and fed, very occasionally, on slops or pap, and all because of a fuddlement regarding precisely which classification of cretin type he fell into.

It is important for the reader to understand that for all his derangement and dementedness and bloodlust and psychopathology and the echoes of those mad horrible maternal songs ricocheting forever inside his skull, Babinsky was filled with a boundless fraternal devotion to Babinsky 2. How often he had vowed, if once he could find his lost half-brother, to clasp him to his bosom and slobber over him and teach him all the tricks of strangulation and slicing up and bone-smashing and other such murderous techniques as he had mastered! Oh, he had vowed as much at least three or four times during the long insanitary decades of Umberto’s and Ignatz’s kingship.

So now, on this windy March morning, apprised at last of his idiot half-brother’s plight, Babinsky preened his walrus moustache and set off for the grim bleak vile border outpost where Babinsky 2 was confined. On the way, he killed and killed and killed again. Close to the border, he stopped in a post office to ask for directions, and while he was there he bought some postage stamps. Well, to be more accurate, he did not so much buy them as steal them, having first snapped the spine of the postmaster and chopped him up with an axe. Having wiped his hands clean on one of his many rags, Babinsky was disconcerted to note that the heads of both Umberto and Ignatz had been scratched out on the postage stamps, and in their place was a hasty potato print of quite a different head, a head which bore a distinct resemblance to Babinsky himself.

“What can this mean?” he shouted, in vain, at the bloodied body-parts strewn across the post office floor.

What it meant was that, only the day before, the regime had finally collapsed. Umberto and Ignatz had been helicoptered into exile on a faraway sea-girt atoll. The revolutionary council had freed Babinsky 2 from his chains, and his cellar, or his attic, and installed him as their puppet leader. From that day on, for untold years, Babinsky 2 ruled the land, idiotically, chained up, sprawled on innumerable soft plush cushions, in the presidential palace and fed, copiously, with fruit ‘n’ fibre breakfast cereal and smokers’ poptarts and Feroglobin vitamin supplements.

Babinsky himself was never granted an audience with the puppet potentate, but he had other fish to fry, and bones to break, and throats to slit, and gore to spill.

For a couple of years early in the present century I had a mobile phone. By current standards it was a clunky and primitive affair, on which I was able to make telephone calls (which I did), send text messages (which I rarely did) and play a few games (which I never did). One day the rental period expired and I did not immediately renew it, nor did I investigate any shorter-term or pay-as-you-go options. I put the phone in my desk drawer where it nestles still, gathering dust.

Owning a laptop and being a constant user of what our Belgian pals call Het Internet, it would be both preposterous and pretentious to call myself a latterday Luddite. But the laptop is, I think, the only thing I own which marks me as a citizen of the twenty-first century. Discounting the unused mobile (itself a 1990s model) which, it is true, could be juddered back to life (I assume), I have nothing else that I couldn’t have owned in, say, 1960. I have no television or microwave oven or digital camera or any other space age devices. This is not a conscious pose, a foolhardy attempt to be a living anachronism. I am, for example, perfectly happy to use teabags rather than leaf tea (though how I miss the tea strainer as a numinous everyday object!). It is simply that I find it possible to live a contented life without all this stuff. And whenever I sit on a bus and watch people jabbing at the tiny keyboards on their devices, or listen to them jabbering away on their phones, and when I can restrain myself from throwing a pocketful of pebbles at their heads, I am reminded that I am better off without these things, and that one day I am going to take that old mobile phone out of the desk drawer and throw it in the bin, or crush it underfoot, or donate it to a passing mendicant.

But as I say, the laptop is an essential part of my life, one I would miss much, much more than I miss tea strainers. And it is because I am an online kinda guy that I am aware of such things as apps, which as far as I can gather are the multitudinous wonders available – essential – for mobile phones and smart phones and iPads and tablet PCs and whatever else the digital person-about-town is jabbing and gazing at and jabbering into. So it seems to me only right that in this brave new world there really ought to be a Hooting Yard app, even though I wouldn’t use it myself. The question is, what in the name of all the saints in heaven would a Hooting Yard app actually do?

It has occurred to me, you see, to employ a gaggle of unpaid interns to work – tirelessly, chained in a cellar, fed on slops – on the development of the Hooting Yard app. The technology, of course, holds no terrors for these young persons. They might gawp uncomprehendingly at a tea strainer, but the creation of an app comes as naturally to them as breathing. Nevertheless, in their plaintive little voices, they pipe up “What is it you want the Hooting Yard app to do, Mr Key, innit?” And thus far I have no answer ready for them. (Though in a happy moment I did consider the possibility that my app might deliver a disabling electric shock to the user upon their each and every utterance of the barbarism “innit”.)

Having got this far, however, and recognising that a world without a Hooting Yard app is a world not worth living in, I feel I must plough on, indefatigably. But the interns will grow restive when they have completed the interim project with which I have fobbed them off, the development of the iTea Strainer. So I am appealing to the constituency of Hooting Yard readers and listeners to drum up ideas. You will, I am sure, have been sat there, jabbing and gazing at and jabbering into your device, always with that nagging thought at the back of your puny pea-sized brain that, however exciting and versatile and efficient and entertaining your pad or pod or digithingummyjig, its true potential has yet to be unleashed, because what it really needs, to justify its very existence, let alone its cost, is to have inserted into its electronic innards the app of apps, the Hooting Yard app.

When you have worked out what it will do, let me know, and I will tell the interns, by way of a note scribbled in pencil on a scrap of paper rolled up and sent through pneumatic tube down to the cellar.

Unaccountably, I missed by two years the centenary of the replacement of tin by aluminium in the manufacture of what we still call tin foil. As so often, we have boffins in Switzerland to thank for this innovation, namely Dr. Lauber, Neher & Cie., who opened the world’s first aluminium foil rolling plant in Emmishofen in 1910. For those of you, and I know there are many, who like to keep track of these things, Emmishofen is in the canton of Thurgau, or Thurgovia, in ancient times the home of the people of the Pfyn culture, who apparently kept large numbers of pigs.

As I say, I neglected to mention the centenary at the time, and I know that many readers will have been drumming their fingers impatiently for the past two years, wondering when I am going to get round to telling you what to do with all that tin foil you have accumulated in your kitchen drawer. Well, I am delighted to say that at long last I can turn my attention to this splendidly versatile material. Just bear in mind that when I talk about tin foil I mean aluminium foil, and I am not expecting you to try to track down a stash of the old tin stuff, even if there is any still available, which I suspect there is not.

The best thing you can do with your tin foil is to fashion for yourself a conical tin foil hat. It is important that you make a cone shape, rather than trying to mould the tin foil into the approximate shape of, say, a Homburg or a trilby or a stovepipe hat. Though the wonder of tin foil is that all these hat types could quite easily be made, you must stick to the cone. In part, this is in homage to Jimmy Goddard and the copper cone he used for daily communication with space people. But do not jump to the conclusion that your tin foil cone hat will help you to talk to space people. It won’t. Nor will it protect you from weird unearthly menacing electromagnetic rays and beams and invisible hoo-hah. If such phenomena exist, and can dislodge and jumble and even control the innards of your brain, they are hardly likely to be dissuaded by a sheet of tin foil, are they? Nonetheless, when forming your surplus tin foil into a hat, it is well to pay tribute to Jimmy Goddard and the STAR Fellowship, for as Jesus said, “A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. And he could there do no mighty work” (Mark 6 : 4-5).

But you can do mighty work, wearing your conical tin foil hat. I am thinking specifically of amateur dramatics. Some might call that leisure, rather than work, but believe you me, if you put your heart and soul into it, amateur dramatics can feel like work, and mighty work at that.

There are several parts in the repertoire where the wearing of a conical tin foil hat is absolutely essential. Consider, for example, Old Nahamkin in The Man Who Came To Dinner In A Shiny Pointy Hat by Belper Frisson. It is not, admittedly, a very big part, and for most of acts two and three the character lies apparently dead on the floor of the parlour while all hell breaks loose around him, but just think of the applause that always greets his entrance, and that ringing line “Hello, I have come to dinner, and I am wearing a shiny pointy conical hat”. It is also worth bearing in mind that Old Nahamkin gets to keep the hat on, even after he is poisoned and stabbed and shot by the vengeful Cassandra, he keeps it on throughout acts two and three, lying motionless on the parlour floor, and at no time is the hat snatched by one of the other characters, who gets to wear it instead,

That does of course happen in one of the other great conical tin foil hat parts, the squalid mute in Pepinstow’s An Inspector Wearing A Shiny Pointy Hat Calls. The squalid mute, of course, turns out to be a police inspector, a revelation somewhat less revelatory than Pepinstow intended, given his cack-handed way of giving the game away in the play’s title. But that need not concern you. You will just need to make sure, as the curtain falls at the end of each performance, that you retrieve your conical tin foil hat from the actor playing Sergeant Piffle, who snatches the hat from atop the inspector’s head in that riveting scene at the end of act four, and wears it himself in a clever ploy to foil Jasper’s attempt to gain Nitty’s inheritance. It might be a creaking plot device, but whenever I have attended an amateur troupe’s performance of the play it has never failed to bring the house down.

There are other parts, in some really tiptop dramas, where the wearing of your conical tin foil hat is not actually called for in the script, but adds a certain something to the character. You might get into arguments, or even fisticuffs, with the director, if they are the type of director averse to the disporting of unnecessary conical tin foil hats. If this is the case, the best thing to do is to say that you are under attack from weird unearthly menacing electromagnetic rays and beams and invisible hoo-hah and must wear the conical tin foil hat as protection. Most theatre directors, professional or amateur, will succumb to such a protest, particularly if it is voiced in a wild and high-pitched screech.

If you loathe the very idea of amateur dramatics, you can still find advantageous opportunities for the wearing of your conical tin foil hat. Promenading, loitering, and hiking are all suitable activities, particularly the latter, particularly in the rain, particularly if it is torrential. There is nothing quite like the sound of the incessant pinging of water on metal, as you hike in your conical tin foil hat through a teeming downpour.

The other day, as I was wending my way along the city streets, I saw, on the back of a passing bus, an advertisement for a product called Feroglobin.

I have since learned that this is an iron supplement for the formation of haemoglobin. But it seems to me that a moving vehicle is not an advisable place to advertise it, for one glances at the poster, and before one has a chance to read it properly, away growls the bus, out of the range of one’s vision, or at least of my, myopic, vision. I would have liked more time to scrutinise the advertisement, for on that first glance I misread it as Ferogoblin. I then spent rather a lot of time wondering (a) what in the name of heaven a Ferogoblin might be, and (b) why it was advertising itself on the back of a bus. My mind reeled.

Readers may recall that almost exactly a year ago I wrote here about the official colour coding system for goblins. To recap briefly, the agreed categories are as follows:

Red : Hobgoblins.

Orange : Fat Goblins.

Yellow : Pilfering Goblins.

Green : Teutonic Forest Goblins.

Blue : Goblins found under sinks.

Indigo : Wet Goblins.

Violet : All other goblins not classified above.

According to this list, Ferogoblins – which I take to be a contraction of Feral Goblins – must be included in the “all other goblins not classified above” subset, unless of course there are goblins which are both feral and hob, or feral and fat, or feral and given to pilfering, or feral and dwelling in Teutonic forests, or feral and found under sinks, or feral and wet. I suppose such goblins might well exist. But for the sake of argument, and because it is tidier, let us assume there is a discrete type of goblin known as the feral or fero-goblin. Logically, then, it must fall within the “all other goblins” category, which would mean code violet. Yet intuition, and indeed common sense, tell us that violet is not at all the most suitable colour for a feral goblin. In fact it seems utterly inappropriate, the sort of colour one might only apply to a feral goblin in a world turned upside down, a topsy turvy world of chaos and confusion.

This insight leads us to the startling conclusion that feral goblins must therefore be somehow outwith the known colour spectrum. Imagine that! I told you my mind was already reeling, and now it reeled even more. It perhaps also accounts for their feral nature, that they may be untamed and prone to havoc on account of being set apart from the normal run of goblins. Such alienation can cause low self-esteem, as we have learned from many addle-brained social psychologists in recent decades. What could be more damaging to a sense of goblin selfhood than to be forever banished, by one’s very nature, from the visible colour spectrum? It is a harsh fate indeed, so no wonder they turn feral.

However, I was clearly thinking along the right tracks, because so terrible a social stigma could well account for feral goblins advertising their existence on the backs of buses. It is one way to get yourself noticed, as the producers of several dire West End musicals have discovered. But an advertisement on the back of a bus does not come cheap, and one wonders how the feral goblins raised the necessary cash. My guess is that they were in cahoots with the pilfering goblins (code yellow), who diverted a proportion of their ill-gotten gains to the feral goblins in return for the Lord knows what maleficent favours. Being feral, the feral goblins may have agreed to, for example, gnaw and slash at and scratch and screech at innocent passers-by, terrorising them into a state of paralysing fear so that the pilfering goblins could come leaping down from the rooftops and make away with their wallets and purses and cashboxes. No doubt the two groups would then meet in a secluded goblins’ nest to divvy up the proceeds.

This does raise the question of the bus operators’ willingness to accept advertising on the backs of its buses from such nefarious clients. Or, let us say, it would raise that question were it not the case that I misread the advertisement, which turned out to have not a jot to do with goblins whatsoever. You live and learn.