Monday, June the 20th, 2005

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Sieves and Basins

I have long been promising a definitive series of articles on basins, and am well aware that readers are champing at the bit. Is there anything else, other than a bit, at which one champs? I wish Dobson had written a pamphlet listing other items suitable for champing at, but alas!, he never did, to my knowledge. Even had he done so, it would be out of print, and I would have the devil of a job tracking it down.

By the way, word reaches me that a complete listing of every single Dobson pamphlet has been posted on the internet, but I have yet to track it down. Google gives about two and a half million pages for “Dobson” and nearly twenty thousand for “Dobson+pamphlet”, and finding time to look at that amount of information dizzies my tiny curdled brain, I'm afraid. It would help if we knew Dobson's first name, of course, but I am not sure he had one.

Aloysius Nestingbird once spent a whole winter trying to find out if Dobson's parents ever called him anything except Dobson. He was working from the questionable premise that “everyone has a first name”, and as a result his health was ruined. They took him to hospital in a wheelbarrow, because he was unable to walk, and the ambulance persons were unable to get a stretcher into the hayloft where the scholar was holed up. He had taken refuge there, covered in straw, as the neurasthenic fits brought on by overwork became more pronounced. Nestingbird's mental state was always fragile, as were his shinbones. As a youth he had been an enthusiastic, if incompetent, player of hockey, ice hockey, water polo, and other games involving hefty wooden sticks capable, when wielded with sufficient force, of smashing his bones to bits, as they did, regularly. “It is a bitter irony,” he wrote, “that I acquired a second first name, being known as Aloysius Splinterbones, whereas I was unable to ever find just the one name for Dobson.”

Of course, Splinterbones was not the only nickname that Nestingbird picked up in a career that spanned more decades than I can recall with certainty. Whereas the provenance of Splinterbones is easily explained, some of the others are mysterious, while yet others are highly mysterious. Why, for example, did a little gang of infant banditti who roamed the canal towpaths always refer to Nestingbird as Tab Hunter, when he bore no resemblance to that celebrated actor? We do not know.

I have not forgotten that you are champing at the bit for an essay about basins. It would have been written by now had I not received a letter from a reader asking a deceptively simple question.

Dear Mr Key, wrote someone signing himself Chris De Burhg [sic], When you write your long-awaited and no doubt superb piece about basins, will you be addressing the related issue of sieves? After all, surely a sieve is just a basin with holes in it?

As soon as I read this, I rent my garments and let out a shrill cry, like the Wild Boy of Aveyron. My dejection was immense. I picked up a handful of pebbles and hurled them through the open window at the crows perched on the fence. Then I picked up another handful of pebbles, bigger ones, and threw them at the starlings on the lawn. I knew that both the crows and the starlings would take their revenge later, by pecking at my upholstery and my towels, but the business with the pebbles relieved the pressure on my brain and lifted my spirits, albeit temporarily. I went and washed my hair with an exciting new shower product, then sat down and fired off a reply to my correspondent.

Dear Mr De Burhg [sic], I wrote, You may think you have asked a simple question by raising the issue of sieves as nothing but basins with holes in them, but the simplicity is deceptive. I will now have to rewrite the piece from scratch. So distraught was I on reading your letter that I rent my garments, let out a shrill cry, threw pebbles at crows and starlings, and washed my hair, which is still dripping wet. My brain is now calm enough for me to put pencil to paper. I am going to tear up everything I have written about basins and begin again.

I signed the letter with wild stabbing thrusts of the pencil, burst into tears, and became all floppy, like a rag doll, neglected and abandoned by the side of a hateful pond.