Friday, May the 14th, 2004
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This is the first instalment of the Hooting Yard Pin Bulletin, an important new series published as a service to readers who wish to be kept informed of all things pin-related. Here, for example, is a very useful tip from one Judy Amarose: When pushing pins into a foam board, try using a metal thimble. That will help save your fingers! You know, I think Judy is right. Dobson, of course, wrote about pins on a number of occasions, most famously in his pamphlet There's Hours Of Fun To Be Had With A Handful Of Pins, the only one of his works to be published under a pseudonym. The first edition of fifty-six copies, run off the press by Marigold Chew despite the fact that she had a collapsed lung at the time, purported to be by an author named “Blenkinsop”. When a second edition—of just four copies—was printed a decade later, Dobson reverted, wisely I think, to his real name. Jed Git, the wastrel Dobson scholar who perished in the 1958 Munich Air Disaster alongside the “Busby Babes”, hailed what he called “that pin pamphlet” as among the works that would prove to be timeless classics, celebrated a thousand years after their author's demise. He was wrong in this, as in so many things. Incidentally, forty-six years after his death, Jed Git's paramour still places a posy of primroses on his tomb on the sixth of February every year. The primroses are invariably withered.