One yet to be sheared

Usage examples of hogg.

And there's this Hogg that was a lord and gave it up to be prime minister but he didn't get it so he goes round ringing bells and telling them all off.

He slid his empty glass towards Hogg, impelling it as though it were a child's match-box ten-ton truck.

He turned back to Hogg to nod at him in grudging admiration as though he, Hogg, had made all this.

Then he picked up their glasses and brought them to the counter for Hogg to wash.

This had interested them, and they had tried him on other poets, of all of whom -- Wunn, Gain, Lamis, Harkin, some such names -- Hogg had never heard.

Still, when you thought about these cybernetic triumphs and what they were capable of, and how a psychiatrist as cunning as Dr Wapenshaw would be quite likely to have banks of electronic brains working for him (and all at National Health expense), then it was just about possible that the summons might be about this particular hole-in-the-corner thing that Hogg had done, an act of recidivism, to use the fashionable jargon.

Otherwise, he, Hogg, and Dr Wapenshaw had achieved a condition of mutual love and trust that, however official and Government-sponsored, had been looked on as a wonder in that green place of convalescence.

Had not Dr Wapenshaw shown him, Hogg, off as an exemplary cure, inviting colleagues of all nations to prod and finger and smile and nod and ask cunning questions about Hogg's relationship with his Muse and his stepmother and his lavatory and his pseudo-wife, cooling all that turbulent past to the wan and abstract dignity of a purely clinically interesting case to be handled by fingers smelling of antiseptics?

He was a man with wild grey hair who spoke with a cultivated accent which made his demotic vocabulary seem affected, which, if he was, as he evidently was, one of Dr Wapenshaw's patients, being rehabilitated in the same modes as Hogg himself had been, if he really had been, it probably was.

The man launched wild fluttering wings of paper at Hogg and Hogg deftly caught them.

Had he not spent an entire summer among men given to sudden despairing ejaculations or, worse, quiet confident assertions about the nature of ultimate reality, often delivered, Hogg and other patients shaken awake for the intimation, in the middle of the night?

And Hogg had hurled at him his third fluttering paper bird of the afternoon.

He crept towards Hogg, his eyes blowlamping in shame and anger, holding the skull in both hands like a pudding.

Dr Wapenshaw now stomped over to kneeling Hogg and began to lift him by his collar.

Some short time later, Hogg sat trembling in a public lavatory.