Seven years later, Woodspring was satisfied that he had finally constructed a rocket ship sturdy enough to carry a human being, a comfortable armchair, a cup of cocoa, and a small library. He announced to the public that the launch would take place next to the bowling green at Cudworth Park on the 1st of August 1910, and a large crowd duly assembled on that date. Woodspring began the programme by delivering a lecture on the physics of the rocket, and followed this with a demonstration of the launch, and a detailed commentary on the rocket’s path as it blasted out of the Earth’s orbit. After inviting the audience to ask any questions they might have, he was soon forced to concede that he was in fact supposed to have been inside the rocket during take-off and had forgotten amidst all the excitement. Humiliated, his only consolation was an intellectual victory over an eight-year old child who had taunted him with the suggestion that his cocoa would be getting cold, instructing the young brat that in the vacuum of space, his cocoa would remain warm indefinitely.

Undeterred, Woodspring set about building a new design, which could be ignited from the inside through the ingenious method of leaning out the window with a long pipe. His plan was to suffer a setback however, in the form of passing of the British Explosives Act of 1912, which rendered illegal the launching of rockets on British soil, and dampened the ambitions of many an aspiring British astronaut. Incandescent with rage, Woodspring drove his improved design to London in the back of a company truck and launched a vocal protest on the cobbles of Whitehall, just yards from 10 Downing Street. His ejaculations drew the attention of Prime-Minister Henry Campbell-Campbell, who appeared publicly outside his residence to announce that Woodspring was guilty of the upmost treason, and ought to go home and take his toys with him, like a good little Northener. Woodspring responded with an impressive show of patriotic defiance, taking one final puff on his pipe before reaching out of the window and launching the rocket and himself into space to enthusiastic applause from onlookers, and much grumbling from passing Hansom cab drivers.

Humiliated by this slight, Campbell-Campbell ordered Scotland Yard to send a squad of detectives to arrest him, but after several minutes of inspecting first the ground on which the rocket had launched, and then the sky through which it had forcefully exited, they concluded that this would be somewhat difficult. Campbell-Campbell immediately ordered the passing of the British Criminal Justice Act of 1913 which demanded that the most serious offenders be launched into space, and then pronounced Woodspring to be a criminal of the most notorious kind, and stated that he’d got exactly what he deserved. (Campbell-Campbell later appeared to have a change of heart regarding space travel, establishing the British Space Programme, and channelling a large chunk of taxpayer’s money into a project to build the first Prime-Ministerial rocket ship. Anecdotal evidence suggests this about-turn may have been inspired by a showcase of French science-fiction cinema which the Minister for Culture had invited him to attend.)

The whereabouts of Humphrey Woodspring remain unknown, but his original unmanned rocket ship is still in graceful orbit around our Earth. It was only several years later that his contribution to space travel was fully appreciated, and in 1954 the government repealed the Explosives Act of 1912, replacing it with the Humphrey Woodspring Act which endowed his original craft with the status of Grade II listed vehicle, and required that it be furnished with a fresh mug of cocoa every year in the event that he should ever return to collect it. The British government is currently locked in a bitter dispute with the International Space Station over whether or not this should be part of the official ISS remit.

The debate reached crisis point in 1712 when Carelli lost three fingers from his left hand in a tragic counting accident, and was unable to recover them in time for preservation. Upon hearing the news, Boger rushed to his writing desk to prepare a gloating letter, only to discover that the desk had been stolen the previous night; presumably, he conjectured, as part of an attempt to extract the centimetre and sell it on the black market. Keen to prevent their creation from falling into the wrong hands, Boger and Carelli agreed to meet halfway in order to settle the matter like gentleman. Several heated letters later, they concluded that ‘halfway’ was located somewhere between the bar and the billiards room of a small pub in Copenhagen, and they convened at the Hviids Vinstue inn on the 12th of December 1712, finally emerging two days later on the 14th with a written agreement and severe bruises on their faces and bodies.

In a jointly published article for the journal of the Association Internationale d’Métriques (International Metric Association), they stated that a centimetre was henceforth to be defined as "the exact width of five Danish beermats", with a millimetre being defined as "precisely half of one Danish beermat", and a metre being defined as "an indeterminate amount of Danish beermats, roughly equivalent to the height of one Danish beer keg".

The beermats in question are now held in trust by the Timkeeper er Sammenslutning af Danmark (Timekeeper’s Association of Denmark), who are responsible for maintaining the Danish Mean Centimetre, which they periodically adjust due to the increased accuracy of modern measuring techniques, and the slow but erratic degeneration of the beermats.

Thanks to the vision and dedication of Boger and Carelli, centimetres are now known to every schoolchild, and can be purchased in batches of 30 from most good stationery shops, or by sending a stamped addressed envelope of at least 1 cm in length and height to the following address:

Dancing Henry Metrological Supplies,
Block 27A, Sir Henry Drummond Estate,
DH1 2MT

Day 20-two. I have been observing the uuniv`rse for some time now, and have determined that it follows a regular cycle of steady expansion, followed by a sudden contraction to near-invisible level and then a violent explosion approximately every 16 hours. During one of the periods of expansion I was able to programme my equipment to track the movements of one small cluster of clay-like particles, which was revolving at a fantastic rate around a much larger sphere of plasma. A great deal of the surface of the clay was covered in a bluish liquid, and it was crowned by a white crystalline substance at each end. After observing it for several seconds, I endeavoured to introduce to its surface a small amount of bacteria I had scraped from my boot, and I proceeded to carefully note the reaction. For the first second or so, nothing seemed to happen. Then as I watched, a green fungus seemed to grow rapidly over much of the clay surface, and it’s rocky outcrops split apart and appeared as tiny islands amidst the blue. A second later I saw the fungus receding and being replaced by small grey structures, and tiny pinpricks of incandescence. No sooner had this change occurred then I noticed small particles of debris being expelled from the surface, and saw tiny expulsions of gas and smoke beginning to surround the cluster. As the image grew increasingly distorted I dimly perceived the white crystalline substances disappearing and saw that the rocky outcrops and greyish structures had been engulfed entirely by the blue. It remained immersed in this state for several seconds, during which time the ball of plasma around which it orbited grew rapidly in mass until the point when it completely absorbed the cluster and all others surrounding it before collapsing suddenly into nothingness. Upon refocusing my equipment I watched the same pattern occurring again and again throughout the sample, and I sat there, fascinated, as my uuniv`rse continued its seemingly unending cycle of implosion and explosion, of existence and non-existence.

Bl*wthr’k presented his findings several months later at an inter-realmoid conference on sub-atomic hedgerow maintenance, having been refused entry into almost every other major scientific forum. Amidst a cacophony of jeers and hisses, he postulated that the ‘uuniv`rse’ may in fact serve as a microcosm of the super-realm in which they lived, and that perhaps life in their realm had been scraped from the boot of a being on a yet larger and more complex plane of existence. His colleagues were quick to dismiss the idea, calling him a "daisy brain" and advising him to "go back home and play with his dollies". Returning to his lab in a fit of anger, Bl*wthr’k 25j proceeded to stamp on the uuniv`rse twelve times and then flush it down the toilet. His last journal entry, from Ogglesbon the blenth reads as follows:

Day 4-hundred and 7. Bosonic communicator working again. Received contact from possible empyreal uber-being. Told him to do one. Had toast for supper.

He recommended that a global committee of all (civilised) commonwealth nations be appointed in order to create a hotel suitable for inter-dimensional travellers. Located at a key juncture in the space-time slipstream it would allow guests to seamlessly exit their own universe and slip into another one in order to experience for the first time the awesome effects of existing on another dimensional plane, and to do a spot of sightseeing. Drummond suggested that the main feature of the hotel would be an inter-dimensional restaurant which would serve local cuisine from every known universe to guests and paying customers alike (non-paying customers would not be served, Sir Henry was at pains to point out). When one objectionable member of the assembly rose to his feet and pronounced the endeavour to be absurd on the grounds that no inter-dimensional travellers had ever been known to visit our universe, Sir Henry simply retorted that this was probably because there was nowhere for them to eat.

After applying for planning permission from the mayor of Llandanelli, a Welsh village directly beneath the area of space in which Drummond proposed to tear a hole in the universe to be used as a catering hatch, he enlisted renowned chef Francois Souffe Sr to design a menu suitable for beings from every corner of the multiverse, and ordered four-hundred thousand embroidered napkins. Sadly the events of 1939 caused Sir Henry to abandon his vision of achieving solidarity with creatures from all nations in all dimensions, as the release of the film The Wizard of Oz convinced him that opening portals into other worlds could only result in an influx of dangerous eccentrics, and led to a fear of munchkins that would haunt him to his dying day.

Today, all that survives of Sir Henry Drummond’s grand vision for an Inter-Dimensional Hotel are some of the menu concepts created by Monsieur Souffe. These offer us a fascinating insight into the culinary preferences of other universes, and the Drummond Archives are proud to present them to you as a tantalising glimpse of what might have been…

The Cougar
Shadowy assassin who captured the public’s imagination in the 1970s when he made the sensational claim that he was going to track down and kill the oldest person in the world. Unfortunately, The Cougar’s preparation was so painstaking and methodical that by the time he was ready to pounce on the unfortunate geriatric they had already died. The Cougar promptly switched targets to the next oldest person in the world, but tragically they also snuffed it before he had a chance to kill them. After several thwarted attempts, a frustrated Cougar announced that he would instead devote his energies to assassinating the youngest person in the world, and is currently presumed to be making preparations in hiding, after research carried out by The Dancing Henry Foundation found that the youngest person in the world is so young that they will not be born until 2054.

Kabooshi Chronium 0.0.1
Prototype for a biologically engineered alarm clock which could be implanted in the heads of the chronically lazy; a last resort for those who found their attempts to be on time for work thwarted by snooze buttons and the frail construction of conventional alarm clocks. In order to quash any attempts to worm out of getting up, the clock featured no deactivation procedure, and the small group of subjects who trialled the implant in 2012 were dismayed to learn that they would be waking up at 6.45am sharp every morning for the rest of their lives. A few desperate members of the group resorted to suicide to escape the incessant beeps, but found that the clocks were so effective that they awoke the next morning in the mortuary, and indeed every morning in increasingly decayed states for the rest of known history.

Satsuma-Friendly Tangerines
Prior to 1994, the methods used in bagging tangerines had meant that some satsumas would inevitably get caught up in the netting with them. After left-wing pressure groups protested at the number of small orange fruits that were being unfairly caught up with their small orange fruits, a United Nations motion was passed which banned the unethical catching of all things that weren’t the specific thing being caught. As well as enforcing satsuma-friendly methods of tangerine capture, this law also necessitated the introduction of tangerine-friendly satsumas, mandarin-friendly clementines and hot dog-friendly baked beans.

Hoop and Stick
Playground game which caused controversy in Victorian times when newspapers claimed it had inspired an incident in which two schoolchildren rolled their classmates down the hill whilst savagely beating them with metal rods. Hoop and Stick manufacturers dismissed the idea, instead blaming the children’s behaviour on heavy baroque music.

Quanti-Fresh
Brand of air freshener developed by Danish physicist Mikael Nedersen that worked by taking air molecules from alternate universes and injecting them into ours, giving us completely new air. Unfortunately, the same device was developed simultaneously in several parallel worlds by Michelle Nedersen, Mikael Dendersen, Mitchell Neederson’s third head, Earth president and sentient Num Lock key Mo’ Dandy, and the ghost of Richard Pryor, and soon air was being imported and exported throughout the multiverse with no regulation. A G-infinity summit was eventually held in which it was decided that air would be taken from a universe in which humans had evolved without lungs, pumped through all other universes (in order of stuffiness), and finally dumped in a universe devoid of fossil fuel and heavily reliant on wind energy. It is predicted that this last universe will eventually burst under the pressure, but experts point out that in an infinitely varied number of universes, at least one person will have figured out a solution. They are yet to identify themselves.

Umbrigsaw
Fiendishly difficult 3-D jigsaw which forms a full-size umbrella when assembled. Something for a rainy day.

Celebrities Eating
Popular British teatime television show from the late 00s in which a group of celebrities would be invited into the studio every day to eat their dinner under the the gaze of an enthralled audience. The show became so popular that, after a record number of deaths from malnourishment in 2008, experts concluded that people were so engrossed in watching Celebrities Eating that they were forgetting to eat themselves, and a survey carried out soon after found that a growing number of young people were actually refusing to eat unless they got to do it on TV. The situation grew so critical that by 2011 celebrities were the only people in Britain still eating, the rotund forms of the more regular Celebrities Eating guests cutting quite different figures from the withered bodies of the general population. Just as things looked hopeless however, a gormless public suddenly realised that the only fat people left in the country were A-list celebrities, and that obesity must therefore be the route to fame (the fatter the better). At the time of writing, British citizens have become the fattest in the world, gaining pounds at a remarkable rate and triggering yet another health scare. Nevertheless, it is predicted that this trend will start to reverse by next year, after Channel 4′s documentary “Extreme Anorexia: The 12 Stone Man” makes a superstar out of its waif-like subject and inspires a new generation of impressionable viewers to put the chips to one side, and shove their fingers down their throats.

The roots of the horror genre are in the creepy silent classics made by a group of German film-makers in the early 1920s which were deeply influenced by expressionist art. To better portray the deranged worlds of their stories, geometric shadows would be painted directly on to backgrounds, and sets would be constructed with peculiar angles and sharp corners jutting forcefully into the film frame. The movement was sadly short lived, however, due to the unusually high number of eye-loss and other injuries caused by the scenery, but its influences remain. Among the acclaimed films made in this period is 1922′s Friedrich’s Cupboard, a film which in recent years has gained a reputation as being ‘cursed’, as all the people involved in its production have now died.

In the 1930s, Global Films released a string of acclaimed horror films based on popular literary monsters such as Dracula and Frankenstein, cementing their status as the archetypal horror villains. Though initially successful, Global struggled to provide fresh plots for its stable of characters and was eventually forced into scraping the barrel with monster mash-ups such as The Mummy and Frankenstein’s European Vacation, Adolf Hitler Meets the Wolf Man and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Get Hitched.

Most horror films of the 1940s were low-budget affairs, and producers such as Max Halton (head of AOK’s B-unit) were forced to find ways to keep the audience scared through subtle cinematic techniques. In particular, Halton felt that the imagination was the scariest thing of all, and the monsters in his film would often be consigned to the shadows, their presence only revealed through unearthly sounds and snatched glimpses under flickering lights. As his budgets were slashed further Halton grew to rely on these techniques more and more, resulting in films such as They Live in the Shadows…, which took place entirely in pitch dark, and The Monster is YOU! in which the audience were confronted by a blank screen and instructed to imagine the scariest thing they could.

Film producers of the 1950s decided to dispense with Halton’s theories, relying instead on the lurid appeal of make-up and special effects. Unfortunately they also had to deal with budgetary constraints, resulting in shoddy looking creature design which would damage a film’s credibility. To avoid loss of verisimilitude, film-makers would often attempt to justify the monster’s appearance within the world of the film itself, leading to genre classics such as The Papier-Mache Monster (in which a child’s school art project comes to life) and Jerky Invaders from the Planet Plasticine.

Another staple of 50s and 60s horror was the creature movie, in which a large animal would attack a series of remote farms and lighthouses before violently working his way up the property ladder and launching an assault on the big city. Most famous in this field was the “Creature Feature Company” who boasted that they were capable of producing a different movie for every animal on Earth, and even had a zoological department that was dedicated to discovering new species in order to generate more plots. This ultimately led to diminishing returns, as there was very little public appetite for films such as The 50 Foot Malaysian Small-Winged Stick Mantis and Attack of the Long-Eared Alpine Field Mouse.

The 1970s saw the birth of the slasher film, in which a group of people would be picked off one-by-one by a serial killer. Often criticised for its predictable “death by numbers” approach, the genre reached its epoch in the 1980s with The Deadly Wait, a three-hour film in which a bored psychopath systematically works his way to the front of a long queue at Alton Towers.

Since the 1970s many film-makers have attempted to use horror movies as political allegories, making powerful statements on the issues of the day. Britain’s Spanner Studios broke new ground in the early 80s when it raided its back-catalogue of characters to provide material for a slew of thoughtful, topical films. Most notable are Jack Frost versus The Abominable Snowman, a somewhat over-literal Cold War parable, and Dracula in Africa, the controversial last entry in their Dracula series in which the vampiric Count tragically dies after contracting AIDS.

Such social commentary was not always commercially successful. Whereas the mad scientists and nuclear monsters of previous decades had cleverly preyed on audiences’ fears of technology going too far, 80s cinema failed to be quite as convincing, with films such as Pacman takes Manhattan and Deadly Pong seen by most as unrealistic. Instead, the decade saw a trend towards gratuitous gore and body horror, with films such as Prickly Business, the excruciating story of a woman impregnated with the spawn of a demonic hedgehog, and Dismembered, in which a man is raped by his own penis.

Zombies have been a staple of the horror genre since the late 60s, with their groaning, shuffling antics striking fear into the heart of many a cinemagoer. In recent films zombie-lore has been updated, and they have gained the ability to talk and run. Further revisions in upcoming films will even see them managing to hold down a steady job, eating sandwiches instead of human flesh, and not being dead, thus completing their transition from being scary monsters to being exactly the same as ordinary people.

The 1990s brought a rash of post-modern horror films, such as 1994′s innovative slasher movie Eek!, in which a group of teenagers making a film in which a group of teenagers making a film are killed off one by one, are killed off one by one. 1997′s Eek 2! saw a group of teenagers watching the film Eek!, in which a group of teenagers making a film in which a group of teenagers making a film are killed off one by one, are killed off one by one, and being killed off one by one. And 1999′s Eek 3! followed a group of teenagers watching Eek 2!, and being bored to death.

Other popular sub-genres in recent years have included true-crime serial killer films and horror-comedies (though attempts to meld the two genres have not been well received). The most popular films have been teen-remakes of classic horrors, a trend symptomatic of the general kiddifying of the genre. One upcoming film involving a killer toddler set loose in a day-care centre has recently been approved a 12A certificate, a move which has sparked outrage among distributors, as it means that the target audience won’t even be able to see it unless their parents are with them. Fortunately for them, however, a PG certificate has been granted to an eagerly anticipated update of a classic 50s horror film, Wobbly Invaders from the Planet Pixels.

Despite this there are still signs of life in the genre, and many independent companies such as Vortex Films have begun to hark back to the Spanner films of the 80s, striving to introduce social subtext and political allegory into their films. Their cult hit Village of the Doomed imagines an oppressively politically correct society in which the adults of a small village are too terrified to look into the eyes of the children that live there, for fear of being put on the sex-offenders register.

Though the genre might not be in the healthiest state right now, its enduring popularity means that it will be around for a long time to come. Like Madonna, the horror film is able to continually reinvent itself, inflicting progressively more shocking and horrific images upon us as the years go by. We’ll always look to horror films to frighten us, to unsettle us, to provide a disturbing commentary on our times and an outlet for our darkest impulses, just as we’ll always secretly will the scantily-dressed woman to investigate the ominous noises in the basement, in the hope that maybe, just maybe, she’ll get stabbed in the tits. Such is the joy of horror.

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Compiled by Josh Cluderay from entries in The Dancing Henry Almanac, twenty-third edition, vols 12-64.

Nintendo Playa
Super-high-definition video console released in 2017 featuring unique interactive controllers. One of the console’s most innovative games was “Kicking a Ball Against a Wall”, a game requiring players to repeatedly simulate the action of kicking a ball against a wall. The lifelike wall graphics could be projected from the console onto any flat surface, such as a wall, and Nintendo developers created authentic football-style balls that could be propelled against it by players’ feet in order to almost exactly recreate the experience of kicking a ball against a wall. Though praised for its realistic design, the game was also criticised for its prohibitive retail price and its failure to add multiplayer and online modes, which might have enabled “Kicking a Ball Against a Wall” to become a widespread social phenomenon akin to Nintendo’s previous smash-hit virtual reality game “Walking to the Shops and Buying Some Milk”.

JavaCo
High-end coffee company who were succesfully sued by environmental groups in 1994 for allowing their Miami factory to dump waste materials into the nearby ocean over a seven year period. Shortly after the judgement, JavaCo were instructed to reinstate their expulsion of waste products into the surrounding waters when an unprecedented number of dolphins turned up on Miami’s beaches, bleary-eyed and clicking loudly about migraines.

Electric Drummond
Personal computer manufactured by Dancing Henry founder Sir Henry Drummond in the 1920s. While most computers at the time were enormous steel contraptions that took up entire rooms, Sir Drummond envisioned something more compact and accessible, and commissioned what would become the first ever home computer. Featuring a 2-button keypad, the five-stone monitor was capable of displaying up to 1 digit, and Drummond would delight his guests by seeming to magically produce either a 1 or a 0 on the screen in as little as 30 minutes. Although Drummond eventually sold off the Electric Drummond company, its principles had a profound influence on modern technology, and it is a direct inspiration for the binary code that still underpins most digital technology today.

Eric Z. Arnold
American born inventor of the EZ-Arnold range of kitchen products, an array of devices designed to overcome common kitchen problems such as unopenable bottles, leaking teabags, and purple toast. Initially rising to fame on the Home Shopping Network, Arnold boasted that with the use of his EZ-Arnold devices he could prepare and cook a five-course meal in under 7 minutes, claiming he never left home without them. Tragedy struck, however, on a self-catering holiday in rural France when Arnold’s luggage was lost and he was forced to survive on his own for an entire week without the use of his user-friendly kitchen gizmos. He was eventually discovered dead in his cottage two weeks later, having died of malnutrition on the kitchen floor while attempting to prise open a can of beans with a plastic fork, and missing several body parts in apparently unconnected stove and blender accidents.

Just Shoot Me
2004 documentary film in which film-maker and political crusader Buxton Hunt took a critical look at American gun culture, examining the effect that assault weapons have on the human body by launching on a strict 30-day regime of shooting himself in the face every morning with a pistol purchased from a high street store. Initially planned as a feature, the film eventually caused quite a storm in the shorts competition at Cannes.

Alf Ralph
Television painter who gained fame with a series entitled “Any Guesses” in which he would challenge the audience to identify the subject of a partially completed painting, asking them if they could “tell what it is yet?”. The show was finally cancelled after 10 years, when the audience grew tired of the conceit and implored Ralph to reveal the identity of the painting he’d been working on in every show for the last decade. Ralph was forced to admit that he’d been making it up as he went along, but suggested that it looked “kind of like a bunny rabbit, but with squintier eyes and a pineapple where his face should be”.

Speculator Speculators
In the 1980s there emerged a new group of businessmen known as ‘stock market speculators’ who would make money by gambling on the troughs and peaks of the stock market. After the recession of the early 20th twentieth century there was a public backlash against individuals who exploited the market for their own gain, causing a renewed focus on these men. This led to the formation of a group known as ‘speculator speculators’ who began to bet on the fortunes of these speculators, exchanging tips about their speculating habits and publishing information on their personal lives in order to get a better picture of their prospects. Often an unusual day at the stock market would result in speculators receiving a raft of abusive e-mails and phone calls from people who had speculated on them, and the weight of this pressure culminated in an unprecedented number of suicides among the speculator community in 2011 which led to the eventual demise of their profession. Around this time a new group sprung-up of so called ‘speculator speculator speculators’, who speculated as to what the speculator speculators would speculate on now that their were no more speculators, suggesting that they would assume the position of the former speculators on the stock exchange. However, the speculator speculators confounded the speculator speculator speculators by pronouncing the stock market to be ‘actually very boring’, and both groups eventually joined forces, electing to spend the rest of their days at the pub, speculating on such things as how many water pistols they would need to take down a jumbo jet, and who could fit the most marshmallows into their mouth.

Vibe
The fourth primary colour, and an exceptionally brilliant one (hence the common term ‘vibrant’), that was popular up until the mid 1930s, when it was aggressively marketed out of existence by the Technicolor corporation, whose 3-strip colour film process was unable to reproduce it. After the global success of Technicolor Hollywood films such as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and Sir Henry Drummond’s epic King of King of Kings, countries around the world scrambled to remove any traces of vibe from their homes, so as to make them look “more like the movies”. The only country to retain vibe in some form was the unimpressed France, which still claims to hold the world’s only collection of vibe-based paintings and plant-life. When any non-French person requests to view these artefacts however, they get all sniffy and pretend they don’t understand.

Johann van Cruyst
Flamboyant Dutch football manager who invented the concept of “not entirely football” – an unusual playing style in which players would form a rigid 3-5-2 formation, refuse to move either forwards or backwards, and attempt to clumsily shuffle the ball towards the opposition goal. After a disastrous early exit at the 1972 European Championships, Cruyst was fired from the job of international coach, and went on to have an illustrious career designing table-based pub games.

Cardinal Hubert Eggwell
Advisor to Queen Victoria, and keen inventor who developed one of the very first cameras in the early 19th century. Though revolutionary, the exposure time on his ‘Cardinal-cam’ was so slow that subjects were forced to sit absolutely still for as long as 3 days in order to capture an image on the primitive photographic plate. Hubert was eventually executed by the Royal Court for treason after making no attempts to stop a robbery that saw the entire crown jewel collection and estate of the monarchy being stolen right in front of his eyes, the heist having unfortunately occurred during his attempt to take a self-portrait.

Bob Bassett
Long-serving barman of the Dog and Crown inn in 1950s Sheffield who was famed for his witty, and often cutting, remarks – on one occasion informing a customer embarking on an ill-advised business venture that he’d have more luck selling bottled water (then unheard of). When the man, Ian Evian, went on to become a multi-million pound success, Bassett vowed that he would never let any man besides himself benefit from the wisdom of his famous epigrams, and eventually died of frostbite in Greenland’s Arctic tundra while unsuccessfully attempting to sell ice to Eskimos.

Organisation for an Alternative Time System (OATS)
Group of intellectuals dedicated to overhauling our current, ‘archaic’, time system in order to replace it with something less arbitrary than the 24-hour clock. Each member champions, and indeed lives by, a different system, and to date they have had no meetings due to their inability to turn up to the agreed venues at the same time.

Josef Heinzberg
World renowned physicist who accidentally succeeded in travelling back in time by one year, and proceeded to spend the next 12 months working alongside his past self in order to recapture the secret. Having finally cracked the formula the day before the present Heinzberg was due to travel back in time to help the past Heinzberg work it out, the future Heinzberg decided to take the present Heinzberg for a drink to wish him off. A rowdy celebration of their unprecedented scientific breakthrough ensued, resulting in the present Heinzberg sleeping in the next day and forgetting to travel back in time, thus severing the time loop and triggering the present, future and past Heinzberg’s to promptly forget how they had done it. All three are now said to be in a passionate relationship that the scientific community has roundly condemned as being a reckless and irresponsible distortion of the laws of time, a universe-destroying paradox waiting to happen, and ‘really icky’.

Best Dad in the World Competition
Global competition started by Dancing Henry founder Sir Henry Drummond in 1946, in an attempt to redress the worrying post-war situation of women being seen as almost equal to men. Ever year, Sir Drummond would scour newspapers and magazines from around the world to find cases of extraordinary heroism in the name of fatherhood, and the earliest winners of the competition would be men who had been willing to sacrifice everything for their children, and would be rewarded for their efforts with 20 shillings and a piece of crockery which they could show off to their wife if she ever got uppity. However, in 1954 Sir Drummond was approached by several men claiming to be winners of the competition and demanding financial recompense. On investigating further, Drummond discovered that the market had in fact been flooded by counterfeit trophies in the form of drinking mugs, rendering the authentic trophies almost meaningless and resulting in Drummond being rather bitter about the whole affair. Nowadays the competition is regarded as something of a joke, with millions of fathers a year being awarded the title by persons completely unauthorised by the Dancing Henry estate. For several years, the Dancing Henry legal team has been fighting in the courts to bring these (often very young) offenders to justice, and they are speculated to be receiving a hefty settlement sometime in the next 3 years.

Bjorn Ilsson
Swedish pop-star whose music is so bland that almost 950 million people worldwide have bought and listened to his records without even noticing. His albums are in fact so unremarkable that it takes a trained expert to pick one out in a record collection, and it is estimated that one in ten people have one of his CDs on their shelves and don’t realise.

Orno Walberg
After sweeping the Academy Awards with his famed 1943 movie masterpiece Civilian Harry (see About the Almanac for his connection to Dancing Henry founder Sir Henry Drummond), film director Orno Walberg became the stuff of film legend when every single one of his subsequent efforts was subjected to extensive interference and re-cutting by the AOK studios, resulting in a string of some of the messiest, shoddiest films ever released. Walberg spoke frequently and eloquently about his struggles with the studio, and critics speculated that he was responsible for some of the finest lost masterpieces in cinema history. However, after Walberg’s death in 1981, the extent to which he had mythologised his own career became known for the first time when AOK Home Video released a boxed set of all of his films with the missing footage reinserted. Fans of the maverick director were somewhat disconcerted to find that almost all of the unseen material consisted of Walberg slapping his penis against his Best Director Oscar and repeatedly shouting “You can’t touch me! I’m an ARTIST!”.

Tacamahacca
Ancient cannibalistic tribe, the elders of which eat each others eyes as delicacies. As this tradition has not been carried on, their days now consist of stumbling around while their children laugh at them.

Joanna Jameson
19th century seamstress who claimed one day to be receiving communications from the ghost of William Shakespeare, and used automatic writing to set down a play which she claimed to have come from the pen of the bard himself. On examining the play, experts concluded that not only was it of an authentic Shakespearrean style, but was one of his most exceptional and technically brilliant works. A London run of the play was rushed into production, but was soon cancelled after Jameson unfortunately let slip whilst drunk that the whole thing had in fact been a fraud, and she had simply written the play herself. Disgusted, the drama community declared her to be a liar of the most despicable kind and promptly had her cast into the Thames. Several years later, a parlour maid named Elsie Stapleton claimed to be in contact with Jameson, and penned several plays whilst in seance with her that were proven by experts in the field to be absolutely genuine. Consequently, Jameson ended up having an illustrious posthumous career.

Morgan Jones
A man of no consequence, but with an agent so good that he is able to manufacture the inclusion of his name in any publication he wishes. Appears here courtesy of CKP management.

Odantia
Legendary underwater civilisation. According to myth, it was crushed by the sinking city of Atlantis, and the many Odantian scholars and enthusiasts have understandably developed an all-consuming hatred for their Atlantean counterparts. Because of this, many have now secretly joined their rivals on expeditions to seek the more famous of the sunken cities which, when found, they plan to destroy, thus exposing the ruins of Odantia, which they hope to use as an aquatic base for an extensive smear campaign against their hated Atlantean enemies.

Fulimer
A piece of advanced scientific equipment, designed by Dr Theodore Pocket in order to gain higher levels of precision in temperature readings. The function of the fulimer is to measure the temperature of a thermometer, and then add or subtract this from the reading it gives, ensuring a bias-free measurement. Such was the impact of Pocket’s invention that not only did it scoop the 1979 Nobel prize, but has often been cited as the inspiration for the fulometer – an invention designed by Professor John Chocolate to measure the temperature-bias of a fulimer, which was awarded the prize in 1980. This in turn was thought to influence next year’s winner, the fulomometer, and by extension the fulomomiator, fulomomiatormeter and the fulomomiatormetermatic. In fact, some unimpressed members of the scientific community have gone as far as suggesting that every Nobel prize for the last 26 years has been awarded to an invention that has simply taken the principle of the fulimer and multiplied it to ludicrous extremes.

The Dancing Henry Organisation has always been a trendsetter (one of the first, in fact), and our anti-carbon policy was put in place long before the rise of the so-called ‘green’ movement when, in 1953, a scientific study commissioned by Dancing Henry founder Sir Henry Drummond to investigate the physical make-up of members of the most reviled groups on Earth (including Nazis, Gay Catholics, and Vegetarians Who Eat Fish) found that a significant portion of their body mass was carbon-based. Shortly after, Sir Henry instituted a policy forbidding the drinking of carbonated drinks, the breathing of carbon dioxide, and the making of carbon copies in the Dancing Henry offices. A hastily scrawled memo also led to an accidental prohibition on car bonnets in the Dancing Henry car park which remains in place even today.

But enough about us… on with the digest.

Jason Fleming
Author of “Learn How to Write Books” so poorly written and incomprehensible that only the most patient of readers was able to decipher them. This is a shame, as those who did go to the effort found that the advice within them was actually extraordinarily helpful.

Pimentoa
Italian village situated high on the slopes of a dormant volcano. Despite a prediction by experts that it would erupt shortly after Christmas 1926, the villagers remained adamant that they wanted to stay, and staged an elaborate ceremony to mourn their impending deaths. When the expected eruption did not happen, scientists amended the predicted date to Christmas 1927, but after another extravagantly grief-stricken ceremony, the volcano still remained dormant. Experts again moved their estimate back a year, and this pattern has now been repeated every year since, resulting in three generations of children that have grown up to the incessant sobbing of parents convinced that they will never live into adulthood.

Bruno Bandi
Legendary method actor whose most famous role was that of an ordinary mechanic living in poverty on the East Side of New York. In an effort to maintain something of the purity and integrity of the performance, Bandi made the brave decision to refrain from ever committing it to film, and so dedicated was he to his craft that he carried the role from the moment of his birth right up to the point of his death.

Liam Burns
Obituary writer for The Times that became so respected in the 1950s for the exquisitely eloquent epitaphs he crafted for the rich and famous that he need only announce a death for it to became accepted as fact. After his first attempt at a serious novel flopped spectacularly, Burns became bitter and began to use his influence to “kill off” any public figures whom he took a disliking to. Victims of his column would thereafter find it impossible to gain employment, or to be taken seriously by any of the official living. In one famous incident, then Prime Minister Harold Wilson returned to London after a country holiday to find that his death had been reported by Burns in The Times that morning, and subsequently taken up by all the major media. On attempting to enter his home at 10 Downing Street, Wilson was turned away by a security guard with the immortal words “Who are you kidding, Deadzo?”.

Gnusmas
Moroccan dish, often called the most duplicitous food on earth, so disgusting at first taste that it can – and usually does – induce vomiting. However, the aftertaste is so sweet that the prospect of another serving is irresistible. Frequently served in Moroccan restaurants with a side-dish of a cloth and bucket.

Koyanisqat
A state of being which many Native Americans believe can be achieved in place of death if, at the point of dying, your will is strong enough and you are able to retain consciousness. Although the body cannot move in any way, and may in fact appear to be dead, the person is actually extremely lucid and at last able to clearly perceive all the rights and wrong, truths and falsities of the Universe, as well as being highly attuned to everything in their surroundings. Unfortunately, as the person is unable to communicate this wisdom, the Indians soon grow tired of them and bury them anyway.