The Scented Allotment

Toast Stoataffronter is now not really one of the most famous of people. After all, neither you nor I have ever heard of him before. However, I have discovered just how famous – or, rather, infamous - he became during the Victorian era and its immediate aftermath, and that is only because I discovered his Secret Diary whilst rummaging through a box taken down from Grand Uncle Stagnant’s old attic.

It was fairly obvious that the aforesaid attic had not had a good rummage through for many a year, possibly even by Grand Uncle Stagnant himself. The old steamer trunk in which I discovered the diary was itself buried under a large collection of bound copies of Hansard dating back to long before anything interesting happened. Therefore, it was fairly likely that no-one in their right mind, or even standing in a field reasonably adjacent to their right mind, would have shown any interest in exploring further beneath those items without the risk of death from sheer tedium.

Anyway, a cursory glance at one of the many volumes of Stoataffronter’s diaries showed him to be one of the 19th century’s most prolific ‘intimate’ diarists. These 349 volumes show just what a prolific pervert even the young Stoataffronter managed to be, and how he continued refining his techniques of advanced sexual experimentation right through to his old age.

A young Victorian gentleman’s first encounters with the perverted arts were usually at public school, normally when the sexually-curious adolescent boys got together in the dormitories at night to practice mutual sex spatula manipulation, often despite – or, maybe even because of – the stern warnings of the dire dangers of over-frequent solo sex spatula manipulations that emanated from the Victorian pulpit.

A few years later though, Stoataffronter was sent down from Oxford University when he was – scandalously for the time - discovered naked in his rooms with the custard-ensmeared wife of the university rector and a rather indignant mute swan.

Therefore, considered even too perverse to join the clergy like other disgraced young scions of the Victorian middle classes, young Stoataffronter set off to try to redeem himself, and – if possible – earn his fortune in the farthest reaches of the British Empire. But, only two years later having failed to make his mark in Wolverhampton, Stoataffronter set off for foreign shores.

It was while deep in the wilderness of North Canada that Stoataffronter first realised his true vocation, when he discovered that the indigenous natives of the area used seal oils as lubrication for their more unusual perversions (i.e. the ones that did not utilize furs and/or snow). Here, for the first time in his life, he became aware of such local deviations as the fully-consensual oiling of a fisherman’s wife in front of a fire.

After his deportation from Canada, for attempting to coat an undercover mounted policeman in lukewarm custard, Stoataffronter set off for the Middle East.

Stoataffronter spent many years in the Middle East, perfecting his understanding of the perverted arts. Here he was considerably helped by his translation of two of the finest examples of middle-eastern perversion studies, The Scented Allotment and, most famously, The Karma Intenance Manual. Both of which examine in detail, with several helpful numbered diagrams, in the case of The Scented Allotment the Arabian approach to perversion and, in the case of The Karma Intenance Manual, the Indian approach to the rude and naughty.

For example, The Scented Allotment is more concerned with vegetable-related perversions such as the infamous Courgette Undertaking, which was roundly denounced in newspaper editorials when Stoataffronter’s translation of the book was published in London. In fact, so scandalised was Victorian Britain by the frank and open way the book discussed the use of vinaigrette dressing on one’s concubines that it was immediately banned – and therefore surreptitious under-the-counter sales went through the roof (as it were),thus making Stoataffronter a very rich man indeed. The book also introduced to Europe, the use of exotically-scented unguents to the repertoire of the dedicated orgy-goer, as well as the use of the radish when entertaining a Member of Parliament or certain commissioned ranks of the Household Cavalry.

The Karma Intenance Manual however, as more fitting a desert-based nomadic civilisation was more concerned with how to utilise the date or the fig in an erotic context, as well as several tent-based perversions, such as the Groundsheet Surprise, as well as – all-important for a nomadic people – how to secure a postmistress to a camel.

As time passed and Victorian society became more comfortable with its own understating of the perverted arts, and how they must underpin any great society, Stoataffronter became welcome once again in his own country. He returned to Britain at the age of 63, worn and spent from his many years of studying the perverted arts at both theoretical and practical levels.
He spent the remaining years of his retirement studying certain experimental deviations in his country cottage on the outskirts of Tipton.

Stoataffronter died – at the age of 87 – when his beard was caught under a brace of overly-buttered kitchen maids and he, consequently, choked to death on his own excessively-extravagant whiskers. Unfortunately, he was soon forgotten as the Victorian period faded into the past and the Victorian attitude to the perverted arts became little more than a footnote of history.

However, I believe that the immanent posthumous publication of Stoataffronter’s Secret Diaries will make me a very rich man... er... return this great Victorian and eminent scholar of the perverted arts from around the world to his proper place at the centre of any full understanding of the perverted arts in all their glory.