Friday, July the 30th, 2004
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Yesterday's passing mention of botched trepanning operations prompted Pansy Cradledew to remind me of the account given by Nestingbird in his Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Dobson But Were Afraid To Ask. I am pleased to reprint it here:
For about a week, Dobson had been jabbering to anyone who would listen that he was determined to have a hole drilled in his skull. He had been impressed by the sixties songstress Julie Felix, and convinced himself that if he, too, had his cranium punctured, he may be able to resume his abortive musical career. In spite of the loud groaning of his friends, Dobson bought a ukulele and sat listening repeatedly to Julie Felix's recording of The Great Brain Robbery, trying hopelessly to learn the chords.
Thursday came, a day of incomprehensible weather and newspaper headlines about a previously unknown strain of potato blight. Dobson slipped out of the house before breakfast, returned his library books, and caught a train to Mustard Parva, where, having located the high street, he rapped upon the door of Dr Stanley Hinge.
“I want you to drill a hole in my skull!” shouted Dobson, overenthusiastically, brandishing a drill-bit in the face of the bewildered medico. The pamphleteer wrongly believed that Dr Hinge was the local secretary of the Julie Felix Fan Club and would therefore be sympathetic. Alas, he had got the wrong man.
What happened next was so appalling that I cannot bring myself to describe it to the delicate readers of Hooting Yard. Suffice to say that Dobson emerged from Dr Hinge's surgery three hours later, bloodied and bandaged, with no less than fourteen dents in his head. Dents, but no holes. Suffering from temporary amnesia as a result of the doctor's cack-handed attentions, Dobson spent the next three months wandering aimlessly around some hideous rural backwater, living off berries and canal water, sleeping in various noisome barnyards and talking to cows.