Saturday, June the 26th, 2004
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Dobson was famous for being utterly incapable of telling jokes. In his memoir of the out-of-print pamphleteer, A Few Days Spent With Dobson On A Mystery Charabanc Tour, Jasper Poxhaven recalls a particularly agonising evening:
We disembarked from the charabanc at a derelict country tavern called, I think, the Cow And Pins. Dobson headed straight for the bar and bought our drinks. It was quite in character that he did not ask me what I wanted, but presented me with a tall glass of some foaming, fuming beige-coloured liquid which tasted like a tomb. Casting his eyes around the gloomy interior of the pub, which was lit only by a couple of Tilly lamps, he leaned towards me and mumbled: “You know what, Poxhaven? I think these people need cheering up!” I groaned. Usually I could tell when Dobson was in one of his rare gregarious moods, but this time I was taken completely by surprise. Had I known the itch to entertain was upon him, I would never have accompanied him into the tavern. There was a copse of blasted cedars nearby, and an hour or two spent standing there in the drizzle would have been more amusing than what I was about to witness.
Dobson stood up and cleared his throat. The sullen denizens of the Cow And Pins, barnyard persons to a man, took little notice. “Listen,” commanded Dobson, in that voice of his, “There was a linnet, an ostrich, and a partridge in a train carriage. The ticket inspector came in and said, 'Are any of you birds going to Totnes? Because if you are, there's been a derailment and due to cancellations there won't be any pastries in the canteen'. The linnet looked at the ostrich, and the ostrich looked at the partridge, and the partridge fainted away. Then the train passed an abandoned birdseed silo and the ticket inspector married his childhood sweetheart, Mavis.”
Dobson sat down. Nobody laughed. I abandoned my drink and went to the copse. There was a hornets' nest in one of the cedars. I examined it with my torch. The drizzle became a downpour.