Wednesday, June the 8th, 2005
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A cruel hoax has been played on your gullible editor, dear readers. The Duty Git took a metal tapping machine message the other day, the import of which was that Hooting Yard was being offered a tape recording of Dobson's voice. It was, the mysterious messenger said, a brief fragment from a lecture delivered in a blizzard-wracked seaside resort some time in the early 1950s. I was dumbfounded. If true, this would be the only audio recording of the out-of-print pamphleteer's voice to have survived the conflagration which laid waste the Potato Building.
I had my suspicions that the caller was merely a deceitful poltroon, of course, but after a hastily-arranged staff meeting in the boiler room of Haemoglobin Towers, we sent Mrs Gubbins off to the bank to collect the necessary cash in unmarked fivers. I deplore the crone's instinctive criminality, but needs must when the devil drives, if I am using that saying correctly, which I suspect I am not.
Arrangements were made for a crack-of-dawn tryst under Sawdust Bridge. In exchange for the sum of fifteen pounds, our representative (Little Severin the Mystic Badger) would take possession of a tape recording that, if genuine, would prompt a revolution in the ever-exciting field of Dobson studies. Mrs Gubbins tied a little cloth bag on the badger, patted him on the head, and sent him on his way. All we could do was wait, pacing up and down and drinking endless cups of tea. I tried to distract myself by thinking about chrysanthemums and duck densities, but the tension was unbearable. Tension often is, in prose.
Little Severin returned at four o' clock in the afternoon. Trembling, I took the magnetic tape from the pouch and inserted it into some kind of machine that would play it. And then I listened to twenty-six seconds of speech that I knew in my heart was not Dobson. Mrs Gubbins insisted that it was, but what does she know?
And yet… and yet…
What do you think, dear reader? Listen. Perhaps that accent is faked? Perhaps there is some sort of distortion? Perhaps it should be listened to backwards? Letters on this important matter are welcome.
Is this the voice of Dobson?