Sunday, March the 26th, 2006

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Fingerprints

There were a number of occasions when Dobson had scuffles with the police because of his refusal ever to allow his fingerprints to be taken. It is not that he fell foul of the law often, but there were incidents, there were incidents.

Dobson's intransigence was based on superstition, but he tried to pretend it had something to do with a deeply-held spiritual belief. On one occasion, he even went so far as to claim that he was a Revered Ineffable Master Of The Fourth Order Of Crumplement in the Church of Sibodnedwab, a preposterous fiction inspired by his passing knowledge of Freemasonry*. This drivel held no water with the arresting officer, hence the resulting scuffle.

Dobson arrived at an elegant solution to the problem. Presuming that every now and then he would find himself hauled into a police station for one reason or another (shoplifting, agitation, illegal picnics), and realising that no one was going to be so foolish as to credit his religiosity, he took to carrying in his pockets ten potato slices on which he had painstakingly scored fingerprint-like designs. One whorl he liked so much he repeated it three or four times. He kept the potato slices in an airtight plastic food container which tucked neatly into the inside pocket of his windcheater.

What did not seem to have occurred to the out of print pamphleteer was that standard police practice meant that an officer would be present, and not only present but physically pressing the Dobson digits on to an inkpad and then pressing them again on to a blank fingerprint template. It was not likely that the averagely astute police officer would overlook the fact that they were handling potato slices rather than human fingers. Marigold Chew tried to warn Dobson about this. It was her potatoes, after all, from which he had fashioned his counterfeits. Marigold's latest fad, at this time, was potato peel art, and she had been buying up every last potato within a ten mile radius.

It was not long before Dobson got a chance to pull the wool over the eyes of the police. One Thursday afternoon he was trudging along the towpath of the old canal, during heavy rainfall, when he was placed under arrest. The Cod War was at its height, and a policeman took one look at Dobson and decided that he could be an Icelandic fisherman on a spying mission. It was a time of great tension, and over-zealous police behaviour of this kidney was commonplace. Down at the station, having been roughed up in the back of a van, Dobson was loth to cooperate with the forces of law and order. He was bundled into the fingerprinting room and told to take off his gloves, sharpish. At this point, the pamphleteer pulled his masterstroke. Taking the airtight food container from the inside pocket of his windcheater, he announced that, as an Icelandic fisherman spy, he had had surgery on his hands to falsify his prints, but had preserved his genuine ones on a series of potato slices. The police officer was so pleased by this sudden and unexpected confession that he accepted the blithering inanity of Dobson's tale, accepted a set of potato prints, and locked him up in a cell.

In the event, Dobson served a lengthy prison sentence for piscine espionage of which he was wholly innocent, but he considered this a small price to pay for having not lost his immortal soul through the inky transmission of his fingerprints.

*NOTE : Despite the sinister reputation of Freemasonry, propounded by paperback authors seeking to exploit the paranoid fantasies of the credulous, it is of course an amusing, if rather sad, pastime of men who are stuck in their adolescence. Consider, for example, the thirty three degrees** of Freemasonry, from which Dobson took his inspiration: 1 Entered Apprentice, 2 Fellow Craft, 3 Master Mason, 4 Secret Master, 5 Perfect Master, 6 Intimate Secretary, 7 Provost and Judge, 8 Intendant of the Building, 9 Master Elect of Nine, 10 Elect of Fifteen, 11 Sublime Master Elected, 12 Grand Master Architect, 13 Master of the Ninth Arch, 14 Grand Elect Mason, 15 Knight of the East, or Sword, 16 Prince of Jerusalem, 17 Knight of the East and West, 18 Knight of the Rose Croix of H.R.D.M., 19 Grand Pontiff, 20 Master ad Vitam, 21 Patriarch Noachite, 22 Prince of Libanus, 23 Chief of the Tabernacle, 24 Prince of The Tabernacle, 25 Knight of the Brazen Serpent, 26 Prince of Mercy, 27 Commander of the Temple, 28 Knight of the Sun, 29 Knight of St. Andrew, 30 Grand Elect Knight Kadosh, 31 Grand Inspector Inquisitor Commander, 32 Sublime Prince of The Royal Secret, 33 Sovereign Grand Inspector General.

**NOTE : The thirty three degrees ought not be confused with the Three Degrees, who had a hit in the 1970s with “When Will I See You Again?”

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