Who Could Have Known?

It was my own fault. Maybe that is some consolation. I should not have any excuses but if I did it would be simple tiredness. Not that that would cut much ice with those who will now be subjected to a reign of unimaginable terror.

It was the early hours of the morning. Finally it was bedtime. There were two things I needed to do. Firstly listen for the local mouse who likes to ferret around in our skirting board. Then remove my watch. It gets attached to you when you always wear it. You know you have to remove spectacles because you cannot turn over without realising they are there. The watch is a different matter as it never gets in the way. But eventually I realised I was still wearing it and wearily loosened the strap. No one wants to handle a limp object at that time of night. So I could not be bothered to get up and put the watch in its usual place. I just leaned over and put it on the table. Big deal. It wasn't going anywhere. Off to sleep and forget about it.

Next morning I remembered it was on the table and strapped it on again from there. All well and good. I was not so weary the next night. So back went the watch to its usual post on top of the fridge. The flat is very small you see. Next morning as usual up again and off to work. One problem. The watch was not its usual shiny self. Something was wrong. It worked perfectly well but some of its metallic sparkle had gone. Where once had been crystalline sheen was now a barely winking dullness. Did it matter? I thought not. Then I realised what had happened.

Watches are by nature dependable. They are designed to do the same thing the same way over and over again and feed on their own regularity. But mine had now for the first time been introduced to a new place. It could not cope. In perplexity at a variation in its routine it had sought the place out again. It realised it could not move on its own. But the mouse could. It made the mistake of confiding in the mouse trying to find explanations of its strange feeling that there was a world beyond absolute uniformity. The mouse was only too happy to listen and take advantage of this temporary emotional bond. The inevitable happened. No one realised it to begin with. But soon it was clear that a horror had unleashed itself on the nation.

The first mechanical mouse was born about three weeks ago. At first sight it is harmless enough. Its movement is regular and it squeaks every sixty seconds so you know it is coming. The problem comes when you try to kill it. The first mechanical mouse gave birth to several others and each has their own orbital path. They move around this path with monotonous regularity nibbling away at anything they find. Nothing can prevent them and nothing can resist them. People are losing toes and abandoning their houses as there is no safe place for anyone or anything. Each controlled mechanical mouse zone becomes larger and larger as the mice breed and their orbital paths become wider and wider to fit them all in. Ours is the only flat in the block still holding out against the mice. We also have to hold out against the angry neighbours who have seen their property destroyed by these creatures and expect some sort of satisfaction from me as if I am a mechanical mouse myself.

The watches have been affected too. They are highly temperamental. You never know what time they want it to be as they are so afraid of making a mistake that they barely move and hope the time they show will come round again. They jump from wrist to wrist to seek sweat for food and comfort from the watches which remain more definite. They will not go within one hundred miles of a farmer's wife and have staged several audacious rescue attempts on their computer cursor operating brethren. It is a shame the circus found out too late. Herds of elephants stampede away from their shows and all over the surrounding area when watches in the audience frighten them. Already it may too late to prevent "the end of civilization as we know it". Or "Walsall" to use the correct terminology.

I meant no harm. I do not prefer mechanical mice and temperamental watches to the old ones. I did not understand the consequences of my actions. I also know none of this means anything now. The world is beyond what we call regularity. At least we all enjoyed the occasional burst of originality while it lasted.

To Stick In Your Tea

The great Al Jolson recorded a song called There's A Lump Of Sugar Down In Dixie. In it he refers to how sweet his Southern girlfriend is. What commentators often fail to realise is that the song was recorded just after the First World War. Sugar was a very scarce commodity in America then and particularly in the South. His girlfriend is therefore not simply sweet but very precious and hard to find anywhere.

Like a lot of Al Jolson songs this one has dated. It refers to a social situation which no longer exists. If he were alive today and still top of the entertainment tree he would be singing the same songs adapted to the world of now. A contemporary Jolson song would extol the virtues of a new target depending on the audience.

If Jolson lived in London it is obvious what he would describe his girlfriend as. She would be a plumber. Skilled tradesmen of any sort are hard to find and affordable ones even rarer. Furthermore there is a considerable drive to get women into non-traditional professions such as this. The chorus of the song would run "There's a lady plumber down in Dalston/Who I call my own - She's the cheapest little pipe restorer/I have ever known". Most singers would not create the response they would like with these words but as Jolson demonstrated many times during his lifetime he could pull it off.

If Jolson were back in America he would also not have to search too far for an object of his affections the audience could relate to. The rise of the religious right in that country has had the twin effect of creating a deep reverence for Scripture and creating an absurdly inflated sense of America's purpose in relation to it. The conflation of the Bible with the American Way has produced a nation of people who think they are put on this earth to take possession of Scripture and interpret it to the rest of us who were here thousands of years before and in some cases actually know what it means. It is no coincidence that the ludicrous Mormonism has thrived in this climate. In contemporary America Jolson would be singing "There's a secret scripture south of Erie/That we call our own - That declares we are the only nation /God has ever known". Jolson was of course Jewish and was brought up with such notions. An American audience would be so proud of itself that it would never consider the contradiction of a Jewish man acknowledging what the Fundamentalist Christian right regard as their private though unimpeachable truth.

But of course there is now a state of Israel. As the World's Greatest Entertainer Jolson would have been welcomed in his homeland with open arms even though he was actualy born in Russian Lithuania. He would be invited to sing in the most prestigious venues and be almost a personal pet of the President. What would he sing about in Israel? Lumps of sugar in Dixie would have no meaning there. The way to convey the same notion would be to invoke territory Israel claims or occupies which others dispute. Admittedly this applies to the whole country. Jolson however would sing "There's a group of mountains call the Golan/That I'm glad to own - There the sweetest little clumps of homeland security/We have ever known". The lack of scansion would surely be forgiven as long as extreme patriotism raised its head. If accused of being polemical Jolson would simply point to his lack of synagogue attendance and his support of Christian causes as well as Jewish ones. Not that he would care anyway as he could probably buy any country he chose and say Raca to all those who made comments about him.

All of these scenarios are feasible if Jolson rose from the dead as all his true fans know he will. This would however leave us with the Early Music problem. There are musicians who will play early music using all the instruments, techniques and styles of the period it was written so you hear what was actually intended. All that is missing is an audience from that time whose interpretation of what they hear would likewise reflect the period. In order to convey these concepts in a modern way to a modern audience you would also need a modern singer whose style everyone could relate to as a development from what they knew before. Who could hope to emulate Jolson? As always this column has the answer. Only the Crazy Frog who has topped the charts with non-music could deliver these new songs in the correct cultural context. This would of course have an added benefit. It would kill off rock and roll overnight and send everyone rushing back to the far superior Jolson as soon as possible. If the Crazy Frog is what we have come to it might just begin to cross people's minds that there might be something wrong with the assumption of eternal progress.

Resources At Our Liptips

Ken Dodd once drafted a book which outlined regional variations in what makes people laugh. He called it The Giggle Map of Britain. If something is intrinsically funny where its hearer comes from should not affect their response to it as Buster Keaton demonstrated. Nevertheless there are cultural quirks which define whether something is always funny or only funny some of the time. What is funny to a Northerner may not be funny to a Midlander. In fact very little is funny to a Midlander as some of us have found to our cost.

Ken Dodd's book is an important cultural study but it does not go far enough. In order to profit from it you have to tell jokes to people. But before you get to that stage you have to rehearse. This means telling jokes to dummies, walls, plants etcetera. It would be more useful if the tastes of these objects were defined and then related to human tastes. If we know how to make inanimate objects laugh we can apply the same techniques to humans to produce the same response.

Dummies are often considered funny in themselves which is one reason why ventriloquists have them. I would be sued for libel if I told you the other one. Dummies however regard their condition as the norm and the human condition as absurd. One source of amusement for them is how humans move their necks. Whereas a dummy can detach its head or turn it through 180 degrees humans have certain limits in both vertical and lateral movement. It must be very funny for a dummy to watch humans trying to point themselves in impossible directions to look at things and how easy it is for someone to come up behind them unawares. Similarly human speech must be highly amusing to a dummy. Dummies cannot talk on their own despite the best attempts of George W. Bush to persuade us otherwise. To hear humans coming out with the sounds of dummies on their own without hands up their backsides must tickle their fancies greatly. Humans also sleep. Most people seem to find fun in other people farting. Dummies must respond the same way to the sound of humans snoring. If would-be humorists did all these things deliberately they would learn how to create the best response in dummies and how therefore to apply the same techniques to human taste.

As we were told during the Second World War walls have ears. They absorb everything around them to create the culture of that building and several together create the culture of a street or town. That is why we respond differently to different places. But if walls could also talk all this accumulated experience would come out of their mouths and be lost forever. It must therefore be a great amusement to walls to see people trying to convey information by talking. Such futile gestures would be their version of the alternative oblivion comedy of the 1980's. Similarly they must be shaking themselves silly when humans forget things. How the allegedly superior human can fail to learn from their experience is beyond those whose mortar structure prevents them forgetting anything. Not for nothing is the structure of mortar the basis of computer memory systems whose own impish humour we have come to take for granted. Walls will also be amused by people standing still and saying nothing. Babies always smile if you imitate their every move. Walls must be cheered by the sight of humans pretending to be them.

Plants always respond to being spoken to. We are told this is due to the beneficial effect of the carbon dioxide we emit whilst speaking. Actually they grow more when they feel better about themselves as they do when they laugh. The growth rate of humans must amuse them. Why does it take eighteen years for humans to reach their optimum height when it takes a plant a few weeks? Similarly our faces must be funny. All the same colour unless it is particularly hot or cold. No stripes or speckles or differential responses to light. Nor does light make them grow. A plant magician would stick a miniature human in a cardboard box with a lamp in it and pull them out the other side exactly the same size to howls of laughter from their plant audience. Once again there are ample opportunities for humans to maximise their condition for comic effect and thus learn how to create the laughter they seek.

We have all seen embarrassing atttempts at humour. People who are being payed good money to appear on TV programmes fail miserably to connect with their audience. This is because they have never learned their trade. It is all very well making humans laugh. But if you have no idea how to make other things laugh you will not have the tools of your job and everything will be hit or miss. We have an alternative we have disregarded for so long. But there is a reason that funny ha ha and funny peculiar are the same thing with two different interpretations. Humans gave those interpretations to cover their lack of humour. To inanimate objects they are fundamentally the same and this fundamental of truth is ultimately what all of us will spend our lives trying to see by our widely differing pathways.

The Beacon Of Pitch Darkness

This morning I met Kate. This very nice King Charles Spaniel was wearing a coat saying "Support Dog". I asked its owner what this was about. She replied that Kate was there to help her with her mental health needs.

Clearly this has not been thought through. If dogs can really have a positive effect on mental health every dog owner would be an Aston Villa fan. But if that happened every dog owner would understand the international conspiracy which prevents us winning our rightful trophies and want to correct it. Then there would be no vast professional football industry creating millions in revenue and taxes because there would be no public interest in the game when Villa won every competition they entered. Even the best intentions of the best individuals would not survive against the vested interests of so many.

However the incident does shed further light on the psyche of those who rule us by controlling our welfare services. If a dog is supposed to help with mental health needs dogs must be equated with sanity. There are far more people diagnosed with mental health problems than ever before by those who have the power to do so. It is instructive to understand the version of sanity these people expect us to aspire to.

The first manifestation of our rulers' version of sanity is a wet nose. All dogs have one unless they have some medical problem. It has traditionally been believed that humans only have one if they have a medical problem. Presumably we are asked to believe this conventional wisdom is false. Nevertheless it takes a lot of effort on the part of humans to have a perpetually wet nose. Living in a continuously cold and wet climate would help but that would mean politically incorrect cultural assumptions were being made. No one would dare say that people who live in cold and wet countries were inherently more sane than others. Clearly there is an expectation that humans will do everything they can to have perpetually runny noses. To capitalise on this the National Health Service will soon be producing Nose Thermostats which rapidly cool and heat a perpetual supply of liquid when strapped to the face thus creating a perpetual cold in their wearers. This may sound extreme but it does at least create a visible benchmark for sanity. To avoid being cast out of society and labelled as sick for the rest of your life you simply need to wear one of these devices all the time and tell everyone how good they are. This will demonstrate your unimpeachable sanity in the eyes of the powerful and privileged who will all be wearing them themselves as a matter of course.

The second manifestation of sanity is being covered in fur. Most humans find this very difficult and would shy away from such a condition. The only known fur covered humans are the famous Andre Agassi and Stella McCartney and even Mr. Agassi has rebelled by shaving his head. Nevertheless we are now led to believe that this is what sanity consists of. Although this sounds just as absurd as the idea of everyone having a wet nose it is a much more sinister proposition. In the Old Testament the hairy man Esau lost his birthright to the smooth man Jacob when Jacob pretended to be hairy before their blind father. It is most unusual for a leading politician to be hairy and apart from Mrs. Thatcher there has not been a bearded British Prime Minister since the Marquess of Salisbury. By being hairy we might be sane but we will also give up our birthrights. All our liberties will be handed over without a fight to the smooth politicians who are making these rules. We are being encouraged to believe that this is the only sane and rational thing to do.

The third way you can demonstrate that you are sane is by wagging your tail. Humans do not have tails of course but there have been considerable moves in the last thirty years or so to reintroduce tails into the gene pool. First it was figure hugging jeans which showed off people's backsides and persuaded people to aspire to a distinctive tail again. Then there was a variety of new dance forms involving swinging the tail around or gyrating from the base of the tail which made it essential to have a protruding tail if they were to be performed on a daily basis. Then there was the publicity given to the "bum cleavage" of fat men and labourers on various television programmes which tried to persuade us that it was shameful to show the top of the buttocks if there was no tail visible there. Nowadays at party conferences you see a platform of senior politicians who appear to be shifting in their seats when speeches are being made. They are doing no such thing. Whilst the hoi polloi are applauding the speaker they are wagging their bottoms back and forth to demonstrate their sanity and therefore the higher authority of their response. Apparently sanity like Socialism can only be practised by those able to afford it.

It would be interesting to meet a human who fully manifested these characteristics of a sane person on a consistent basis. In all probability there will never be one which is why dogs are used as the exemplars. But there may in fact be a method in this madness. Every generation has its idols people try to live up to. No one ever does in fact become who they set out to emulate but they spend a great deal of effort trying. They would of course be better off trying to emulate our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ. But trying to emulate dogs to prove you are sane is hopefully the final absurd extension of this wilful refusal to be human. Then we will discover what sanity really is. All we will then need is to justify why we have chosen to ignore this for so many thousands of years.

Why Red Is Violent

Several U.K. towns are known for their association with acts of war. Hastings and Evesham are known for their battles and Roxburgh and Hereford for their sieges. In our more peaceful times these towns now promote themselves as places of historical interest on the basis of this association. Those interested can compile lists of battlefields and siege sites to visit and transport themselves to the world of their ancestors.

Few people would include the sleepy town of Market Drayton on that list. The town does have military connections as it is the birthplace of Clive of India. Yet it is not known for having seen action itself. There have in fact been two sieges of Market Drayton and one is going on right now. People are not aware of them because too many vested interests are too embarrassed to admit what has been fought over in that town.

Market Drayton has one famous product apart from Clive of India. It is the home of gingerbread. Most English people eat this confection and are happy to admit their appreciation of its taste and culture. Those same English people are however terrified of associating it with people. Everyone has had hair at one time and this hair is some sort of colour. Every colour bar one passes unnoticed. Yet if a person has hair the same colour as gingerbread it arouses deep animosity for reasons no one seems to know. There is a whole lexicon of abusive terms for ginger people which does not exist for any other colour of hair. To be ginger is to bear a mark of distinction so great that a range of irrational fears grips the less tonsorially gifted.

The first recorded usage of any of these abusive terms was in 1204. In this dark Plantagenet age we read of the "rowset playgue" spreading across the land. For centuries this was thought to refer to the Black Death until it was realised that "rowset" is a variant of "russet". Those with ginger hair were seen as some sort of sorcerors who could change their hair from a natural colour by magic. One day a ginger person was found with a packet of Market Drayton gingerbread. This was held to be the magic potion responsible and officers of the King descended on Market Drayton. Originally they rode around the town looking for the witches who were casting spells on cornmeal to change it to gingerbread and change hair colour. When they discovered that most of the town was engaged in producing the substance they declared that the place was a threat to national security. An army of men-at-arms and angry residents of nearby towns soon surrounded it. The townsfolk had no choice but to stay inside the town walls with the supplies they had left and defend themselves as best they could.

The siege seems to have lasted about eight months. We cannot be certain because only the winners write histories and no one in Market Drayton could read and write at the time. What is known is that the army invested and undermined the walls. The defenders at first used the usual tactics of hurling rocks and boiling oil from the battlements but soon realised that there would always be more people outside the walls than inside them. They therefore decided to destroy the royal armies from within. Rather than drive them away they enticed the royal soldiers closer and then hurled sticky gingerbread onto their heads. Those without helmets were immediately butchered by their colleagues when they were seen with this evil substance on them and those with helmets were made to sleep outside the camp on their own and were picked off one by one by small Draytonians who had crept out through the mine tunnels created by the army. The king of the time was John who was never popular and always in need of troops beside him to ward off frequent threats of rebellion and invasion. As time went by he realised that his knights would be better employed protecting him from people who might kill him than witches who might turn his hair ginger. In the middle of the night as legend has it he withdrew his depleted army from the town. The Draytonians woke in the morning to find the siege lifted and began rounds of wild celebrations. The local landowners agreed with King John that his humiliating retreat was never to be mentioned again. Nevertheless the townsfolk produced the ever-popular armies of gingerbread men who quickly conquered the taste buds to remind the world of their outstanding feat.

Over the centuries people forgot about the siege and the reason for the gingerbread men. Right up until 2003 in fact. Then the first murmurings of a new conflict began to appear. This time however it would be the exact reverse of the first. Both enemy and cause were different. But once again the conflict would inevitably centre on Market Drayton.

In 2003 political correctness was in full swing. All the abusive words hurled at people of other races and colours and physical conditions were declared illegal. With one exception. It remained perfectly acceptable to abuse people with ginger hair. Indeed it became the last refuge for all those convicted of political incorrectness in the past. With all the usual targets removed bigots found sanctuary in calling ginger people names. Very quickly the country polarised into ginger and non-ginger or normal and deviant as the other side would have it. Gingers were understandably angry and looked around for a way to fight back. All gingers are tormented as children by the story of the homophagic Gingerbread Man with whom they are always compared. Where else would he come from but Market Drayton? Determined to remove this slur which had so damaged their lives gingers descended upon Market Drayton but were immediately arrested for travelling whilst confectionery. They were rightly outraged. A national S.O.S. went out and the second siege of Market Drayton began.

So it has remained to the present day. Market Drayton keeps taunting ginger people by producing its confection. The gingers continue to control all supply routes in and out of the town and operate martial law in the surrounding district. No one wants to admit this is happening because they cannot bear the thought that they are being beaten by the people they have mocked for so long. But being beaten they slowly are. Soon political correctness for all will wipe Market Drayton off the map altogether. Then the final triumph of the superior ginger-haired person will be brought ever nearer for the benefit of all mankind.

There is no reason to abuse someone for the colour of their hair. It is sad that the poor people of Market Drayton have to pay the price for the national refusal to behave justly. But it is only right that supposedly moral standards for one should apply to all. Gingers have been under siege for longer than their abusers would ever dare concede. It is a kind of justice when the home of the politically incorrect gingerbread man is being destroyed because those who could preserve it are in a state they would never dare admit.

What That E Is For

One of the symbols of nationhood is a currency. For this reason it is given a name which represents that country to the world in the same way a flag and embassy do. The Bulgarian currency is called the Lev because the word means "Lion" which is a symbol of strength and majesty. The American currency is the Dollar because that is the American spelling of "dolour" which is an accurate description of the condition of wealthy American tourists who seem incapable of openly enjoying their travels. The independent Portuguese currency was the Escudo because Portuguese think their country is both precious and stylish. The currency betokens the fact that when asked to describe Portugal inhabitants are supposed to say "es cute, no?"

It is therefore a wonder why the British currency is called Sterling. This word seems to have no other meaning and bear no relation to anything. What is this word supposed to convey to everyone else about the nature of the United Kingdom?

The term "Sterling" was first coined after the Battle of Flodden between England and Scotland on 9th September 1513. As was usual in those days the victorious English armies went round looting the bodies of defeated soldiers for any valuables they could find. As a great number of Scottish nobles were slain there were rich pickings for the English soldiers who found large quantities of Scottish coins on the persons of the nobles. Obviously being Scots they would not put it in banks and therefore pay interest. The capital of Scotland at the time was Stirling and these unfamiliar coins became known as "Sterling currency". The substitution of an e for an i in the name of Stirling was not simply a variant spelling but a wilful anglicisation of the name to demonstrate that the capital and its products would henceforth be under English control. This Sterling currency had no value in England because exchange rates had not been invented but it was a status symbol for an Englishmen to be in possession of it. It demonstrated that he had fought at Flodden or knew someone who had and therefore rescued England from eternal reliance on porridge even if only for three hundred and fifty years or so.

Previously the English currency was known as the Pound. This was a reference to the way it was made by bashing it repeatedly into its die marks. Using the term symbolised the fact that the English saw themelves as a hard working and powerful people who created wealth with the labour of their hands rather than barter and trickery. The British currency is still popularly known as the Pound but it is clearly stated on the notes that is the Pound "Sterling". This signifies that the subjugation of Scotland was regarded as the just product of the labour and innate quality of Englishmen. This need to claim identity through imperialism has been the staple of British international relations for centuries and is the cause of many of the problems of readjustment we have today.

At first this Sterling currency was just as valueless elsewhere as it was in England. If you were a Scot you could use it to pay for the colours imported into your wet and miserable landscape and you could accept it as payment for your exports of live haggis and distilled bagpipe spit. If you were English no one would accept it from your hands as no prices were calculated in it. It was the Tsar of Russia who finally gave Sterling coins a value in England. He famously declared war on Scotland and England separately and then signed separate peace treaties with both countries with the result that the transferred Berwick-upon-Tweed remained officially at war with Russia. Understanding the joke local traders offered him Sterling coins with which to hire local guides who could show his armies how to conquer the town. Not wishing to admit his embarrassment the Tsar accepted the payment although he soon forgot about Berwick. With such a powerful ruler accepting Sterling the others could not avoid accepting it too and the Pound Sterling thus replaced the ordinary Pound as the English medium of international trade.

In time people forgot that Scotland had ever had its own coins and the pound Sterling was regarded as an English invention imposed on them after the union of crowns. It is fair to say that international confidence in Sterling was always high as its message of tough people absorbing the cultures of others was one which went down well in the age of great Empires. Indeed it was not seriously threatened until the Welsh infiltrated the British Treasury department. Welshmen were not often allowed to be Chancellor of the Exchequer but neutered ones were given government jobs as people who cannot find any other work often are. A few found their way into the Treasury and bought their families over. Soon there was a veritable colony of Welshmen living there. No one bothered overmuch. Few realised then that this represented the greatest threat to Sterling since its invention over four hundred years earlier.

Once the British budget was top secret. As late as the 1950s the Chancellor was sacked if he revealed any details of it to anyone. Then in the 1960s a profound change occurred. Finance experts would appear on TV giving details of what they thought would be in the budget and commenting on them. Their predictions often turned out to be disturbingly accurate. Of course they were. The finance experts had been receiving the first of the now common Budget Leeks. The Welsh had never had a currency of their own. Now they were undermining the British one by replacing it with specially printed leeks which conveyed the true value of everything the Chancellor was trying to tell us was worth more. This alerted a few Scots to the origin of the British currency itself. Immediately the Royal Bank of Scotland claimed to be the rightful owner of all Sterling anywhere. The British government which had allowed Gallic placenames to be reintroduced and Scottish symbols to be put on pound coins could not argue. In 2004 the Royal Bank of Scotland was made the legitimate owner of all Sterling on the condition that it used its threat of porridge to ensure that the U.K. never adopted the Euro. If all European nations were equal the currency would never survive. How could it defend itself against the Bulgarian lion or avoid being overstamped by the French Franc?

The currency is still called Sterling. It represents the United Kingdom's shame at its imperial past and the subsequent capitulation of the English to its absorbed partners. Is this really such a bad image? It is after all legal, decent, honest and truthful. It demonstrates that we cannot compete with our neighbours. But as the martial artists of the East have so often demonstrated only through purity and humility can any victory be ultimately achieved.

The Modern Version For Modern Man

One of the literary phrases which has entered the common language is Grub Street. It describes the generality of hack writers who will pen words about anything for money. In the eighteenth century there really was a street called Grub Street in London where some of these half-starved verbal plodders lived. This disappeared from the map long ago. No one seems to have realised just how radical it was to replace Grub Street not with bricks and mortar but with its modern equivalent.

The virtual estate of Writer's Block was established by Robert Southey in 1827. Southey had by this time discarded his revolutionary past and become a hired literary drudge producing a stream of poems, articles, essays, novels, guide books and anything else someone would pay him for. As a classical scholar he was aware of Homer's claim that when someone cannot be contacted they are away dining with the blameless Ethiopians. As a writer always on call he often tried that excuse when he had not finished one of his interminable manuscripts. The publishers heard it once too often and in the racial atmosphere of the time Ethiopians could not be considered blameless by civilised white Englishmen. He therefore began to claim "writer's block". The phrase was new at the time and publishers assumed this meant some form of constipation caued by eating incorrectly declined verbs. Being too middle class to have constipation Southey therefore invented the virtual estate of writers living together in philanthropic harmony which bore a startling resemblance to the fantastical pantisocratic schemes he had dreamed up with Coleridge in their youth.

Originally Southey sought to actually create a block of houses near his home in Crosthwaite and invite writers to live in them. His wardenship of this project would explain his absence from his typewriter although the fact that this had not then been invented was also a plausible excuse. Being unable to buy any of the surrounding land Southey simply described his home and asked other writers to describe what the area around it and any houses built upon it should look like. Those who sent in the best descriptions were given plots of non-existent land exactly reflecting the descriptions given. These were joined together to create the overall picture of Writer's Block and numbered. The finished plan of Writer's Block was then despatched to the writers concerned so everyone knew what not only their own plot but every other one was like. The system worked well. Southey could relieve the pressure of deadlines by justly claiming he was overseeing the administration of Writer's Block. The other writers claimed they had essential business there which kept them away from work. The community thrived and expanded until everyone who wanted to be a serious writer could quote an address in Writer's Block under the Wardenship of Southey.

One of the reasons Southey got away with this was because he had been Poet Laureate since 1813 and his personal prestige had restored a lot of honour to the office and therefore to state institutions generally. There were many vested interests who were happy to encourage him. The original dream could not last however. In 1837 Writer's Block had formed a happy community of people who never met for ten years. Then King William IV died and was replaced by the young Queen Victoria. Nothing much was expected of the young Queen but she had other ideas. Like King John before her she wanted to make her mark by getting to know every inch of her new realm. As a student of the arts she was aware of Writer's Block and Southey himself excused his inability to travel to London to meet her with his duties there. None of those close to the Queen had the heart to tell her it was only a virtual community. The Queen insisted on visiting Writer's Block herself. Indeed she spread this desire abroad loudly. Some poor chamberlain had the thankless task of travelling to the Lake District to tell Southey that the Queen wanted to be shown around his wardenship and meet the other residents. Southey was gratified that his monarch like him could not see a joke. But soon panic set in and he frantically despatched letters to the other writers summoning them to build a real block in time for the Royal visit which would be three weeks hence.

When the Queen arrived Southey tried a ruse. Most of the writers had managed to join him and all were confident that they could embellish their descriptions of their abodes with a few fantasies about home life and visiting each other. Indeed they crammed together to make sure they all knew all about the published details of each plot. Therefore Southey invited the Queen to meet the writers in his own cottage and explained that the estate was not fit to visit at the present time as it had been flooded by Bassenthwaite Lake two days before. The Queen appeared to accept this. The writers however were so keen to impress that their florid descriptions of their fictitious homes aroused great interest in the Queen. She insisted on seeing them flooded or not. Southey excused himself and let his friend Cartilage accompany Her Majesty to where Writer's Block should have been. She quickly realised that there had never been any such place. But when Cartilage explained that their lives and careers depended on the existence of Writer's Block she was prepared to overlook the deception. Writer's Block would be allowed to stay but under strict conditions. All authors including the existing virtual inhabitants would have to apply to the Lord Chancellor for permission to live there. The number and identity of residents would be state controlled and admittance only allowed if a new applicant not only created a better description of the place than his predecessor in that plot but was prepared to invest funds in building works to ensure that no one else would be disappointed when they visited the colony.

So the system continued well into the twentieth century. The Lake District was happy because the funds invested by new inhabitants created the recreations of their descriptions which form that rich landscape today. Visitors flocked to the place looking for something authentic but happy to know that what they saw was man made and therefore a reflection of themselves. The few writers allowed to live in Writer's Block were still able to skive off work using the place as an excuse and the fact they were one of the exclusive band that could get away with doing so enhanced their stellar reputations still further. But state control also created deep unhappiness. The rest of us were not allowed to live in Writer's Block. If we were a day late with our writing no one would accept our excuses and the full force of the law was with those who excluded us. It was not so in the days of Southey. Then Writer's Block was actually owned by writers which is exactly as it should be as it was created out of their heads to begin with.

Although we all complain things are not all that gloomy nowadays. Two more recent events have alleviated the resentment we long felt towards the place. The first was when the Thatcher government privatised it. Although entry is still limited this is now controlled by rubber manufacturer Dunlop rather than the Lord Chancellor. The reason for the explosion in and permissive attitude towards pornographic fetish writing is not difficult to see. The second is the classification of the obsolete Warden's post as a lieutenancy by Labour Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine even though the management of the estate is undertaken by Dunlop. This post is now therefore an Office of Profit Under the Crown. When a Member of Parliament wishes to resign he need no longer be restricted to applying for Wardenship of the Chiltern Hundreds or the Manor of Northstead but can now apply to be Warden of Writer's Block. It will at least give the place greater official status. The fortunate few that can use the excuse will continue using it with public approval which may one day trickle down to the rest of us labouring in the Typehills of Lesser Verbiage.

Of course Writer's Block no longer needs to be a fictitious community. Thanks to the internet we now have such a thing as a real virtual community. People who have never met can join and be active members of it at will. The idea is attractive but must be met with stout resistance. As long as Writer's Block exists the rest of us can aspire to having excuses. Surely that is what we really want? The more senior we are the more we can get away with. This has always been a living reality regardless of political theory. We should all be glad that writers are honest enough to conduct their profession unashamadly according to this principle.

The Forgotten Bloodshed

When someone says something amusing with a totally serious expression on their face this expression is described as "deadpan". We are led to believe by those who know nothing about the subject that "dead" refers to the lack of alteration in the facial muscles and "pan" refers to the face itself. This etymology is widely accepted as genuine because certain people no longer wish to recognise where the phrase actually comes from.

The phrase does indeed accurately reflect the expression on the face of Mavis Johnson throughout her trial. She showed no emotion whatever when confronted with evidence of her alleged crimes. Society has lost a great deal by forgetting why she was there and the heinous crime she was supposed to have committed which made her such a cause celebre for her brief hour of fame.

Nowadays we have the phenomenon of the outing. This no longer refers to a day trip to the seaside. It is the practice of exposing the homosexuality of someone who will not admit to it in public. By definition these are generally people in the public eye who feel their careers would be harmed if people recognised their true nature. There is not much evidence that this is so. But other homosexuals who are glad to admit their sexuality take exception to this practice and publicly expose them on television and radio and on large posters. Not all open homosexuals agree with this practice as they feel everyone has the right to keep their sexuality private. Nevertheless the militant outers continue undeterred without caring how much they damage people's lives in the name of their cause.

Before this practice developed radical feminists had long sought to deploy similar tactics to shame people into joining them. In past ages closet feminists had been outed by their neighbours and burnt as witches. Although the supposed accoutrements of witchdom were common items found in every home the difference lay in how they were used. The household cauldron became a witch's cauldron when a woman concocted some new dish of her own without being instructed to by her husband. The household broom became the witch's broomstick when she flew through the air on it instead of sweeping the floor. Therefore anyone using these items was always under a certain amount of suspicion and deviant usages were seen as forms of witchcraft. Feminists now tried to reverse this situation by demonstrating that deviant usages of contemporary household goods signified a closet feminist underneath a deferential exterior. This was to show how many women secretly acknowledged their cause. But since the days of the Suffragettes it had become more and more difficult to persuade women to come out publicly. The Suffragettes may have won their case but their antics had done more harm than good and no one wanted to be associated with another women's movement which prized direct action above civilized debate.

One of the main complaints of feminists of the late 1950s was that women were tied to the kitchen stove. Whatever ambitions they might have had would always remain unfulfilled because their job was to serve their husbands by cooking and cleaning and generally supporting them. Feminists believed women should not be obliged to undertake such duties or be brought up to think that was inevitably going to be their life. Such views had wide support in the female population but remained hidden. Most believed it was economically impossible to just abandon their traditonal roles and strike out in some new direction where women were much less likely to be found. They stayed at home and dreamed of someone else altering their situation. Until a few decided that enough was enough and took the direct action no one else would dare.

In those days the staple kitchen item was the gas stove. The pressure cooker existed but apart from that women relied upon the same sorts of pots and pans they had used for generations. They were all made of metal and worked by heating things inside them just as they do today. Of course if they went straight from cold to hot and back again the primitive metals of the time would just break. Saucepans and frying pans worked by a method first described by Leonardo da Vinci in which the flames gently stroked them and the tickling sensation thus produced created an internal scratching and rubbing which heated the metal and cooked the food. When the mysteries of this technique were explained feminists realised that it presented them with a weapon. You could remove women from the kitchen stove by destroying their pots and pans. There would be no sabotaging of power lines or other acts of public vandalism. Simply by stopping the pans from scratching themselves you would render them useless and break their power over women for ever.

Squads of feminists began breaking into cooking pan producing factories at night and coating their products with a smooth glyceroid substance which stopped them itching on contact with flames. These masked women identified each other by codenames and by quoting the password "teflon". When the factory owners realised that their pans had been coated with this new substance they pretended it was a new technique which would prevent food sticking to the pans. This was a more economic alternative than scrapping the production and starting again. People quickly accepted teflon pans but just as quickly realised that they were as good as dead as they were impervious to flames. The manufacturers then revealed the truth of how they had got that way. Several were prosecued for misrepresentation but there was little attempt to catch the women responsible for the break-in. This was not surprising. It was soon revealed that the radical feminists included the wife of Prime Minister MacMillan and the mother of his soon-to-be-successor Alec Douglas-Home. No one was prepared to bring these two ladies to trial but neither were they prepared to give publicity to their cause and destroy the family values of the time. Someone had to pay for what was going on. Mavis Johnson was simply a convenient scapegoat.

With MacMillan out of the country Scotland Yard arrested Mavis in a dawn raid. Apparently she had never heard of the radical feminists but she had been photographed in the Neasden Chronicle buying the first teflon pan. The cirtcumstantial evidence was striking. in 1961 Mavis was charged with the murder of thousands of cooking pans and of colluding with the Soviet Union to destroy civilized society. From the beginning it was clear that there would be only one verdict. While Johnson was on trial the feminists could continue killing pans and let someone who was outside their number take the blame. Anti-feminists had their scapegoat which made it unnecessary for them to investigate further and betray more influential names. Mavis began by protesting innocence but as the evidence mounted she instead chose stoic defiance. She would deny everything by staring impassively at the court around her. She was described by the Daily Mirror as looking "as dead as one of her pans" and the name stuck. By the end of the trial she had firmly nailed her colours to the radical feminist mast and became something of a martyr. Until she started cooking for all the inmates in Holloway and allowed herself to be smothered by a warder rather than reveal all to the press.

Mavis Johnson did not kill any pans. You cannot do that now anyway as their more sophisticated metal actually conducts its own heat by rubbing the flames or electric currents together itself. It was just convenient for everyone to pretend she had. Mavis left a husband and four childen who went on to be either actors or drunks. This suited the rest of the world too. If they pretended to be something they were not or put themselves beyond help they confirmed the slanders about their mother and wife even more and everyone could forget that she existed and find other ways to pursue their pet causes and other people to blame when they went wrong.

Nowadays it is assumed that women are feminists and there is no need to forcibly out them by preventing them from following other paths. Nevertheless the more radical feminists will always believe there is more to be done. The final solution would be to abolish cooking altogether. There is plenty of evidence that this is about to occur and that radicalism will have the same distressing consequences as before. Fast food chiefly cooked by men has already usurped the domestic meal cooked by a woman as the staple diet so the radicals have apparently already won their argument. Now ask yourself this. Why is fast food itself being usurped by an ever increasing quantity of sushi? Of food which is not cooked at all? Of organic food requiring no preparation? When it poisons us all there will be more Mavis Johnsons. The people who have forgotten where deadpan comes from will not prevent this happening. Maybe we should be grateful that we still live in an age when "deadpan" rather than "stopheart" is a recognised idiom in the English language.

All In A Day's Work

It is hard work being a prophet. No one listens to you and you are driven onto the fringes of society. The world is never ready for genius. You are not stoned to death or sawn in half nowadays but you often wonder whether such a gloriously public death would not actually interest people in investigating what your prophecy is and why everyone is so afraid of it.

One of the few consolations of being so out of step with the rest of the world is that there are many other examples of prophets driven into fringe professions whose words have ultimately proven true. In many cases no one even knows their names. Nor do they receive any recognition for their work. But their satisfaction lies in being shown to be correct and therefore becoming mainstream. Every dog has its day and every prophet has their lifetime even if it is not their own.

One of the few female prophets whose name we know is Mrs. Gertrude Swineherd. This lady followed the stereotypical profession of domestic cook. Her family was very fond of cooked meat and the traditional British Sunday roast was obligatory in her home. Over the centuries several other items have been served as complements to the different types of meat involved in the Sunday roast. Mint sauce, apple sauce, breadcrumbs and gravy all have their fans and another such item is stuffing. This concoction of parsley, sage, suet and anyonesguess is forced inside the unwilling carcases of the animals whilst they are still alive to ensure a mature flavour and then cooked inside them after their slaughter and packaging. This practice has only ever been tolerated because the packaging itself is made out of a polished and distilled film of the stomach lining of the animals in question. Nevertheless it has become popular and the quality of stuffing is now considered just as important as the quality of the meat. Of course in Mrs. Swineherd's day everyone made their own stuffing. But as competition amongst the cooks in grand houses became more intense demand grew for a top quality stuffing available in the same form for all cooks which would enhance the quality of any meal.

In truth Mrs. Swineherd's stuffing was not any more distinguished than any other. Nevertheless she was prevailed upon by her sycophantic and gender betraying husband to mass produce her recipe. This in itself was nothing remarkable. The genius of Mrs. Swineherd was revealed in the name she gave to her creation. For no obvious reason she called it Paxo. Etymologists have ever since tried to work out what possible connection there can be between the product and its name. Indeed the general public were equally confused to begin with until the etymologists started making statements about it and they realised that the term "paxo" was more understandable than the word "etymologist". Over the course of years Paxo became the biggest selling stuffing in existence. People appreciated the fact that it was always there for them. It was sold in stores where the preponderance of dusty boxes gave people ticklish coughs. When they approached the storekeepers for assistance they would have to clear their throats. In doing so they made the sound "paxo" and were automatically directed to this item which they could then ask for and use on a regular basis to cover their embarassment.

Still the debate raged. Why was the product called "Paxo"? Various smug explanations appeared to the universal disinterest of the Paxo buying public. It was stated that it had something to do with packing it inside the animals. It was stated that it was a combination of the initial letters of some of the secret ingredients. It was said that it was simply the first name Mrs. Swineherd thought of apart from her own. Mrs. Swineherd maintained total silence on the subject. Indeed she could not do otherwise as she had died of ergonomic dysfunction three years after its introduction leaving the fortune it made to the unqualified doctor who diagnosed and treated her disease.

Then in the late 1970s a strange phenomenon swept British society. A very rough interviewer started presenting programmes on the BBC. During his set autocue routines he appeared charming and rather lost. When he had a politician to interview however it became a different matter. He would ask very direct questions which the BBC had never allowed before and created anger and revulsion amongst his interviewees who were not used to this sort of treatment. Ever since he has been a mainstay of television journalism and his interviews have become an institution. Previous interviewers have been known by their names. He however is known by a nickname. He is universally referred to not as Jeremy Paxman but Paxo. This unique practice has come about for a very good reason. The prophecy of Mrs. Swineherd is unconsciously being fulfilled.

Most politicians have an experience of being stuffed by Paxo. When asked to describe their ordeal they do so in visceral terms. It is as if they have been physically assaulted and had his questions rammed inside them causing them great pain and discomfort and forcing their blood to drain away. In many cases they are cooked soon after. Their careers never recover from a public Paxo stuffing. Unable to stand the heat of aggressive interviewing they resign their ministerial posts and leave parliament with a whimper. Noble animals that once thought themselves kings of the fields suffer the same fate. Finally we can understand how they feel. The term Paxo now has a meaning we can all understand. A meaning which was beyond the comprehension of anyone until the prophecy of Mrs. Swineherd decreed that there would one day be a human equivalent of the stuff she was making which would manifest its true nature.

Of course Paxo is not his questions. The hoover is not Mr. Hoover either but the two have become synonymous. This does not happen often enough to be predictable by anyone other than prophets. Mrs. Swineherd should be doubly celebrated and my fellow prophets do indeed uphold the quality of her vision. So why is she not better known? Because those in the mainstream always claim the credit. The BBC claims that it invented Paxo itself and is currently involved in a court case against the stuffing makers claiming breach of a future copyright. Paxo himself is regarded as BBC property and indeed has the logo stamped on the back of his neck and an editing chip in his upper lip. The BBC may not publicly stone people to death but it has other ways of silencing people. David Icke was once promoted as a prophet. When his Son of God rantings were making headlines he was working for the BBC. Clearly this was an attempt to wash all independent prophets away by replacing their ideas with the superior thought of one of their own. The BBC dropped him just as soon when his crackpot nonsense was exposed as nothing more than that and the tactic backfired woefully.

Prophets are happy to eat Paxo without prejudice. We do not need power to be right. Indeed a case could be made for saying there is a fundamental contradiction between these two things. Why do you need to take charge of the truth? The story of Paxo demonstrates how much better off we would all be if we allowed the truth to run us for a change. Why do you think the upper classes shoot animals but not stuffing? Like all Creation they cannot live without the truth and neither can the world exist without the prophets who guard its every worthwhile element.

Explanation Of Inferiority

English speakers the world over are familiar with the Australian ditty "Waltzing Matilda". This catchy little song is both admired and disliked. It is admired because it sounds nice and seems to express the soul of a nation. It is disliked because few people outside Australia can understand the words. It is not fair for a song to hook you and then leave you unable to join in with it.

There have been various translations attempted. Most of these come from Australians themselves. They are therefore Australian explanations based on Australian opinions. These interpretations of this quasi-mystical text can never have the authority of those of someone born in the Mother Country who speaks the correct version of the language and the linguistic Aston Villa that is the Brummie language to boot. Here therefore for the first time is a translation of Waltzing Matilda which will enable real English speakers to learn and relate to the words as we will then understand what we are singing about.

"Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong." As we all know thieves walk around in hooped shirts carrying their loot in large bags marked "Swag". A swagman is an habitual thief and he is jolly because he is unrepentant and has no conscience whatsoever. He is here presented as the archetypal member of the nation which once stole The Ashes and the America's Cup and many other things from their rightful owners. A billabong is a primitive advertising device. The billboard had yet to arrive in Australia when Banjo Paterson wrote the original version of the song. A billabong is both a gong which is struck to attract attention to someone reading out an advertisement and the person who stands in the middle of the street doing these things.

"Under the shade of a Coolabah tree". The Coolabah was invented in New South Wales by Bruce Awkward-Ness in 1887 as a means of cooling off sheep who had wandered around the hot and dusty ground all day. These were stackable trays with squirting taps at the top and receses for the sheep to run through at the bottom. A coolabah tree was a collection of them stacked one on top of the other which was a form of abuse practiced by urban Australians on their country cousins. "And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled/Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?" Billy was the Australian term at the time for a male genital as they considered this more familiar than the English "Willy". Why his billy was boiling must remain a matter of conjecture. Matilda is a reference to the Matilda who claimed the throne of England during the time of King Stephen. This was an act of open rebellion as was setting up an alternative court at Bristol which was celebrated with riotous conduct by her supporters. By "waltzing Matilda" one is supporting and celebrating the colonial rebellion against English rule which resulted in the establishment of a separate government. The effect of this was later seen when that government declared a national holiday to celebrate a horse race but that is another story.

"Down come a jumbuck to drink at the water hole/Up jumped a swagman and grabbed him in glee". Jumbuck is the Australian pronounciation of Jam Butt or more usually Jam Buttie. These sandwiches which remain motionless in England walk on their own in Australia due to the number of ants and flies in the country which automatically stick to and carry off all sweet foodstuffs. The water hole is a lavatory down which most Australian bread is usually thrown. "In glee" refers to the Glee Club i.e. the swagman was singing when he grabbed the sandwich. "And he sang as he stowed him away in his tucker bag/You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me". It is easy to see why the walking Aussie sandwich would join the swagman in celebration of colonial rebellion but the tucker bag remains a mystery to most. This is because tuckerbag is actually one word which was separated by printer error in the original publication of the song. It refers to a large cape also used by men whilst waltzing in fancy establishments. It was initially developed as a means of hiding away ugly looking Sheilas before your mates saw them with you and was adopted as a fashion item purely to disguise its true purpose from the ugly Sheila most upper crust Australians usually ended up going to dances with.

"Up rode the Squatter a-riding his thoroughbred/Up rode the Trooper - one, two, three". The Squatter does not refer to a person who has claimed a plot of land by sitting on it as Australians claim but to an Australian government functionary whose mere existence like that of his colonial government was then recognised as a temporary aberration. The Trooper as we all know is someone who swears a lot and the numbers are the swear words he utters to the swagman as he is implying that the swagman himself is someone who would use numbers. The swagman is to infer that the Trooper is accusing him of being able to count and therefore being English. "Where's that jumbuck you've got in your tucker bag?/You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me". This is a reconciliation as he is inviting the swagman to a bigger celebration of Australian identity elsewhere.

"But the swagman he up and jumped in the water hole/Drowning himself by the Coolabah tree". It is impossible to drown oneself in an English lavatory but quite common in Australia. This is because Australian lavatories have to be many times larger due to the infiniftely greater fondness for alcohol amongst Australians and the inevitable consequences. "And his ghost may be heard as it sings in the billabong/Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?" Clearly it is unfeasible to sing inside the gong of the billabong. The singing refers to the noise the loot which is in the swagman's swag bag makes as it goes together with him down the lavatory pipe. Under water it sounds like a gong banging and therefore as if the swagman is singing inside the gong. The last line demonstrates that he remains defiantly Australian but in the end is beaten. He has gone down the lavatory and soon all those who claim that it is good to be Australian will go the same way.

Like the equally famous Yorkshire song "On Ilkley Moor Bah' Tat" Waltzing Matilda has a sad and severe edge to it when it is translated. An edge which would explain why Australians have always tried to hide its true meaning. It does indeed express the soul of the nation. It is only a pity that it is not the soul of the Russian nation which never ceases to be mournful and miserable. There it would find a better home. Or would it? To claim to have Australian nationality is to claim to be something you are not as you are merely a transported crook from another nationality. The end of that elaborate trick is as sad as what Australians really are. Maybe the song is a doubly appropriate reflection of the nature of its original singers.

Bread On The Waters And Where It Leads

At the Highgate end of Hampstead Heath there is a series of ponds. One of them is full of birds. These are generally water birds so they are happy enough floating around in the pond. Which makes it unusual that there is a platform in the middle of the pond which birds are supposed to sit on. This wooden structure suspended on floaters has nothing to offer water birds which are designed to swim in the wet stuff and provides no sort of shelter for land birds which have no reason to put themselves in the middle of a pond when they can take their water from the sides where the people with food are sitting. Nevertheless if you wait long enough you will find particularly fat birds will go and sit on it and squawk and ruffle their feathers in exaggerated gestures.

To understand this behaviour it is not necessary to be an ornithologist. You simply need to be a historian. What the birds are doing is obvious to anyone with a grasp of some of the creative endeavours of past ages. It would be sad if the strenuous efforts of previous genuinuses were completely submerged by pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo which seeks to explain away every action in purely rational terms.

The first opera for birds was written by Christoph Willibald Gluck in 1774. This was during his French period. Having made the drama of operas more important than the star singers who performed them for the first time the logical next step was to replace the human singers with birds. The French court had a particular fondness for singing birds so his ideas quickly found favour there. If only he had lived to see the decline of the saxophone as a classical instrument and rescored the saxophone parts for birds with the same pitch of coo the whole of musical history might have developed differently.

The first performance of Also Quack Zarathustra was not a complete success due to the over-chromaticism of the twittering nightingales who as the birds of aristocrats had insisted on performing the main parts. They got so carried away with their chords and fugual harmonies that their skills overshadowed the production. They also had insufficiently dramatic voices. After much argument Gluck persuaded the birds to accept light lyrical roles in future operas and principally the ever popular Tree Stan And His Owl, Der. Large dramatic birds were subsequently recruited for the main parts as they projected right to the back of the room and the full force of the sonorous pronouncements of Zoroaster could impress itself on the audience. If they were true of course Gluck would not have had this problem. But in spite of the essential stupidity of the text the recast opera was well enough received and a grateful nation provided Gluck with a pension. It is not commonly realised that Gluck became the first and last person in the history of the French Kingdom to be granted the dispensation of permanent freedom from pigeon attacks on weekdays as well as the Sundays when all perfumiers and carvers of holes in cheese enjoyed the same privilege and still do to this day.

Having had a minor triumph Gluck sought to develop his new form further. He persuaded opera houses to keep specific bird breeders on retainer to ensure a supply of strongly voiced birds who would then be refined into quality singers at the first Twitty Academies. Some of these birds became famous. Tweet William was much in demand as a baritone in works such as The Masque of Orfeathers and E Fanciulla Del Redbreast. Similarly Gluck developed a new system of notation to indicate the specific birds required to produce those notes. The tails on the ends of crotchets and quavers are the last relic of this short lived practice. Unfortunately there was one problem Gluck could not solve. An opera stage was too tempting an environment for a bird. More than once in every performance a singer would fly around the stage and warble from a new place thus destroying the dynamics of plot and the dramatic effect of the words. Stage managers who had previously tempted the birds to their correct places with pieces of bread now had to throw whole loaves to try to get them to keep to their marks. The distinctive shape of the French loaf was developed at this period to make the bread easier to throw. Soon the sight of loaves of bread winging across the stage became more of an attraction than the bird operas and led to the development of French circus. Bird operas continued to be composed but they had had their day as a public attraction. All that was left was to release the birds and that would be the end of the matter.

As is usual in such cases the first casualties were those who had been manipulated into taking up the activity in the first place. Yet the birds were not about to give up without a peck. Having discovered the benefits of fame and fortune when it came to dealing with other birds they were not about to give up on bird operas. There may not have been much of a human audience but this was of no consequence. The birds began writing their own. Suddenly they understood why humans were using bird feathers to write with and refused to invent pens for another generation. Birds became prolific composers and librettists and used their new skills to explore ranges of bird experience never understood by humans. Of course to begin with they wrote these works for replicas of human stages. But soon they had developed more suitable methods of staging their works. The platform in the middle of the Highgate pond is one of the few remaining British examples of bird opera stages. Here birds perform the long forgotten works of their ancestors in their own languages to their own kind. The guardians of Hampstead Heath know better than to upset birds with loud voices and sharp beaks by removing it so the tradition continues. It is only a shame that the once almost universal practice of birds writing operas was so cruelly halted by the introduction of recorded music and the shooting of the bird composers who savagely attacked the vinyl records when they were produced believing them to be made of dessicated humans ground into a black paste by evil theatre directors.

Highgate is an area which fancies itself as cultured. It is no surprise that operatic birds continue to practice their art there. The only problem is that to preserve their habitat they have to charge other birds admission to their operas. Not all birds are ready to part with their hard earned worms to hear what they regard as their right. Rossini did not write an overture called The Thieving Magpie for no reason but his attempt to alert humans to what was going on went unheeded. None of us seem to know what gives humans the desire to feed birds. Now we can understand that it is folk memory of the brief hour of human composed bird operas that makes us so keen to give them enough material comfort that they are happy to spare a few insects to ensure their culture survives.

The Logical Extension

In recent years people have developed a strange obsession with surveys. Every sort of company sends out these bits of paper with tick boxes on or stops you in the street asking you to take part. The answers are supposed to inform market research. As none of us ever see summaries of the answers we simply have to take their word for this.

Among the plethora of surveys available are many aimed at women. In line with current trends they ask women what they want with the implication that the answer should be something like "great career/sex/power". The most common request however is the more prosaic "self-cleaning house". This has long been dismissed as a fantasy. Now however a group of inventors with a grudge against the insurance industry has taken this request to heart. As they are all men they are not interested in self-cleaning houses. They have however invented other houses which fulfil functions they and many other people have long desired them to do.

The inventors are currently secluded somewhere near the site of the Wembley Stadium development. The continuous building activity there provides sufficient cover for their work should anyone happen across it. Therefore no one takes too much notice when objects fly out of the windows of a building into the hands of passers-by or when someone standing in a particular place receives the whole contents of the house in his waiting arms. The people who should take notice are the companies who provide contents insurance. The inventors have almost completed the first self-burgling house. Most people invest all the money they have and a lot they do not in buying a house and filling it with contents. They then take out insurance on those contents and wait in vain for someone to provide a return on their investment by burgling them and giving them an insurance payout. The self-burgling house expels its own contents into the arms of passers-by by means of light sensors which detect the presence of people of the right size walking past and sonic beams which force the objects along them into their arms. The same beams then return from the person to bounce around the doors and windows to provide the evidence of forced entry. The expelled objects are fitted with an anti-homing chip which prevents them returning to the house if someone brings them back and if left they simply jump into the arms of another person with the same pheromone configuration as the first target. This new house will doubtless become a very desirable property and selling them will be a sure path to fame and fortune. This might even be adequate compensation for living next to the Wembley Stadium complex for so long.

Another of the new inventions has already been trialled by an oil company with great success. This is a house in which specific noises trigger electrical circuits connected to deposits of liquid built into the fabric of the house. The noises are computer-generated simulations of things either blowing up, collapsing or going too fast. When these noises occur the circuits activate the combustible liquid and the house bursts into uncontrollable raging flames. The self-igniting house leaves no trace of what might have caused the fire which can only be attributed to the thing that made the original noise. Film companies will be a major market for these houses as will construction companies in overpopulated areas with political problems. The Palestinian Authority is studying developments closely before embarking on a major rebuilding programme for Israeli settlers on the West Bank of the Jordan. Similarly they have become a staple of local authority housing in Conservative controlled areas.

The ministers in charge of the national housebuilding programme have already made it clear that many former industrial sites will be allocated for this purpose. Most of these are the sites of heavy industry which is now obsolete or no longer needs those particular locations. By definition many of these were built before the advent of ubiquitous electric power and internal combustion engines. They were built where they were in order to utilise the water resources that powered the steam engines everything ran on in Victorian times. Even if the factories have gone the water is still there. Consequently the team of inventors have also developed the self-flooding house. Flooding is notoriously difficult to predict as it relies on a variety of interlinked weather factors. Rises in water levels however are the inevitable consequence of global warming. The self-flooding house uses pads of extreme heat to turn all other moisture into potable water which fills biodegradable plastic tanks under the house. At the chosen moment this is released into the river or canal on the site to flood it and with it the house. The process destroys the biodegradable bags by assaulting them with water from outside rather than in and damages everything in the house beyond repair. The new houses are being surreptitiously marketed as the antidote to the government's attempts to relocate people away from friends and family. With the flood insurance money you can soon afford a better house in your own neighbourhood instead of being forced into a first time buyer unit in a place you have never heard of and care about less.

No one will publicly admit what the inventors in Wembley are doing. Neither will anyone admit to being one of the inventors. It will come as no surprise however that the survey companies are the ones sponsoring their work. Indeed it makes very good business sense. Every product is targeted at particular demographic groups in particular places. If you design their self-destroying houses you know how long they will be there and how much money they will have when they get their insurance payouts. You can then make your surveys more valuable to the companies which commission them. Of course the insurance companies are not likely to pay the policies of people who buy self-burgling, self-igniting or self-flooding houses. Oh yeah? First the insurance companies have to convince the courts and everyone else that they exist. The inventors have gone to great lengths to cover their tracks. They are certain to succeed in their endeavours as anyone who puts one over on an insurance company is bound to have a vast army of public support should they ever need to call upon it.

They Will Return

Not so long ago British society was dominated by one object. The Oxo Cube. This all-pervading condiment was so important to everyone that a building in the centre of London was named the Oxo Tower in its honour. Now however they have practically disappeared from our tables. How has it come to this?

The first Oxo Cubes were discovered in Kenya by British explorers in 1847. They grow at the base of trees and were initially thought to be a form of African truffle. When the explorers removed the silver coloured peel and tasted them they threw them away in disgust. It was not until 1910 that a group of settlers realised that they could be used to make soup. The first Cube farms were established at that time in otherwise undeveloped areas of hinterland and soon the huge deposits of unexploited Cubes were being systematically decimated by specially designed machines known as Nodding Zebu. Several food entrepreneurs grew rich on the export of Oxo Cubes and moved into other areas. Orm Jacobs built his initial wealth with Oxos before achieving even greater success with the biscuits he designed for a special event at his Nairobi gentleman's club. Similarly Jebediah Hazeltine used his Oxo wealth to build a factory to make the drink he brewed for some fellow devotees of Surrey cricket on a cold Spring day which was jokingly named "Ovaltine" after the Surrey ground.

The British immediately adopted Oxo Cubes as friends. They were never absent from a British kitchen cupboard and were invited to stay at the finest country houses. A legend grew up that "Oxo" was the Swahili word for "Royal" whereas it is actually the Gikuyu word for "dung". In time they became as much a symbol of Britishness as fish and chips and coming second in everything. People without Oxo Cubes were considered stupid. The vegetarian movement took a very long time to take root in the U.K. because its members eschewed the Oxo Cube. They were considered mentally ill and several open vegetarians were confined to Broadmoor. The career of popular pianist Cyril Smith never recovered from the revelation that he did not own an Oxo Cube and even Gracie Fields lost her position as the nation's sweetheart after she moved to America to avoid charges of gross culinary indecency arising from her failure to serve Oxo Cubes with the black pudding at a dinner party attended by Kim Philby in Dalston in 1938.

Of course after a while the Oxos got tired of being taken for granted. They formed their own union and threatened to withdraw their labour unless their preferred social policies were implemented. After the Second World War these tactics were particularly successful. Austerity strapped Britain had tightened its belts far enough without losing this staple of its diet. The Ground Nut Scandal of the Attlee years was the result of a concerted campaign by Oxos to destroy monkey nut crops which infringed on their domains. Exports from the African colonies were frequently disrupted by armed Oxos taking the bolts of lorry wheels hostage and various exotic imports vanished from the supermarket shelves when Oxos blacklisted homes which allowed them in their kitchens. The feud with Bisto was particularly fierce. The laissez-faire attitude of the gravy supplement contrasted starkly with the rabid protectionism of the Cubes. It is no coincidence that none of the original Bisto Kids lived beyond the age of thirty and were found either suffocated, strangled or addicted to Brasso. Official documents reveal that Oxo Cubes infiltrated the highest places and precipated the Suez Crisis by ordering Anthony Eden to invade Egypt to prevent lentils arriving in the U.K. The nation has never given Eden the recognition he deserves for facing down this threat by living entirely off brown ale as a substitute. Of course ordinary citizens did not have the power to resist Oxos and their domination was well-nigh total. This is why kitchen cupboards everywhere began collapsing when the phrase "Go To Work On An Egg" was coined by Fay Weldon. The cupboards shook themselves to bits because the Cubes inside them were laughing so much. They knew that whatever eggs might try to claim nothing ever moved in the U.K. without the approval of Oxos.

Their downfall began when Bovril invented a rival condiment called simply Cubes promoted by the popular Terry Wogan. The rival did not last long after Wogan ceased bankrolling it when Oxo Cubes dropped into his coffee and stuck his records to the turntable. Nevertheless the incident demonstrated that Oxo Cubes were afraid of direct competition. The Oxos which had once laughed at the eggs could no longer simply dismiss a challenge. Sensing blood Bovril hit back with what they flagrantly called "Chicken Oxo". These were not genuine Oxo Cubes distributed by their company. They were deviant imitations produced by Bovril to show the world how frightened the once mighty original Oxos had become. The production run of Chicken Oxo was supposed to be a one off but the Trade Unions in the Bovril-worshipping West Midlands took up their cause and their use became a condition of Union membership. Bovril carried on producing the Chicken Oxo sneer and original Oxos became ever more desperate to cling onto power. Indeed they even developed a serrated edge on their peel through selective breeding. The public was taken in by the deception and thought that they were still in the Oxo camp if they used the chicken version. Then the originals lost all public sympathy by resorting to terrorism such as sabotaging gas and electric supplies and massively increasing the bills. Soon there was not an Oxo to be found. The Conservative free market economics had flooded the market with so many better alternatives that the Cubes could no longer compete and occupied a smaller and smaller portion of the shelves. Their power was broken. Back they went to Kenya as companies secretly owned by Bovril chased them out and filled the shelves with glossy alternatives seized upon by the status-hungry yuppies of the time.

The Oxos are still alive and well. Belatedly the native Kenyans have begun cultivating them and three have held cabinet positions in that country. That is the reason no government there sees anything wrong with corruption. They boast every day about making a comeback in the U.K. and are believed to be sponsoring the U.K. Independence Party. But for now they are a distant memory here. The Britain of today is not the one they once ruled. We are used to choice now. It will be many generations before the Oxos come to terms with present realities and can dominate our society again.

The only hope for the Oxo lies in history. Although they were discovered by the West in 1847 they existed long before then and must have formed part of British overseas trade with countries who also traded with Africa. One such country was Portugal. In the wrecks of mediaeval Portuguese ships fossilised Oxo peel has been discovered. Apparently the Cubes were stowing away seeking better lives in Europe. A few must have made it to England in the holds of Portuguese ships and it is not inconceivable that they had made their mark on our history long before the twentieth century. We read that King John died after eating "peaches and beer". If he did he was the only person ever to do so. Given their previous record it would be no great surprise if the "beer" was actually an Oxo Cube in water. If such a thing could be proven it is possible that the Oxo Cubes could once again achieve culinary pre-eminence. King John had few fans. Neither do most Prime Ministers after a short time. The present Labour Party feuding presents an ideal opportunity for the forgotten Oxos to once again find a powerful niche in the Kingdom they ruled for so long.

Perfect Circles

The readers have been howling. In the post entitled "The Nature of Evidence" it is stated that speed bumps breed on their own. In the one entitled "The Reason We Bother" it states that speed bumps are made of short people stuck together and covered in concrete and tar. "Inconsistent" you cry. "Inconsistent equals untrue" you imply.

There is no inconsistency here. It all depends on the soil underneath. Even if the bumps are not in direct contact with the ground the road was built on the quality of the soil still effects what is built there. Acidic soil corrodes the human matter above and new short people need to be found to form new bumps. Alkaline soil enhances the human matter and the short people in the bumps breed regardless of gender. Small bumps are incubated by larger bumps until they get too big and have to crawl under the surface of the road to find an appropriate space of their own. If you expect me to spend half of The Reason We Bother going into these questions you have something seriously wrong with you.

It is a great delusion to believe that inconsistency equals untruth. It is the sort of argument lawyers use to try and win cases. If there are apparent inconsistencies in someone's evidence they claim that witness is unreliable. Yet for some reason they continue to claim their fees. If they are serving justice as they are obliged to do as court officers they should both argue the same case. If the court finds against a lawyer they have clearly behaved unjustly for arguing something which is untrue. Why therefore should they be paid or allowed to continue practising? Apparently one inconsistency equals untruth but another is an essential component of the actual process of truth itself.

The inconsistency goes further. Every so often we hear of cases of police corruption. Officers who wilfully manufacture evidence or take bribes are hauled up before the judges and subjected to waves of public horror. If we have corrupt policemen The System is rotten to the core we say. Rightly so. Strange how no one understands the corollary of this. If policemen lie and lawyers tell the truth about it we think there is something seriously wrong. If policemen tell the truth but lawyers lie we do not bat an eyelid. In fact we regard it as the true state of affairs. What accord has light with darkness? Inconsistency has not only been tolerated but sanctified if it comes out of the right mouth.

Such inconsistencies of truth abound. Bumble bees cannot fly with those heavy bodies and light wings but they do. Stones do not hit the ground when they fall because they first have to fall half the distance then half the distance again ad infinitum so they never fall the whole way. "People" and "from Walsall" are mutually exclusive terms. Truth is still present despite inconsistencies. We only perceive an inconsistency because our understandings are imperfect. Everything in Creation actually makes sense. It is just that we do not understand how as we cannot see the missing links between the different modes of thought through which we interpret the world.

This brings us to the fundamental inconsistent truth. When children get to a certain age they no longer see themselves as children. They are something bigger and dream of being older. They desperately want to enter the world of adults. What happens when they get there? After a few short years they do everything they can to cling to their remaining youth. It is said that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Whoever said this had clearly never tried to guess someone's age. Most people over 30 and plenty younger than that either disguise their age or lie about it. Usually this is accompanied by melancholic recollections of what they did when they were younger. If you speculate on what their age might be however and suggest they might be older than they actually are you are greeted with a fearsome sight. Redfaced spluttering and toxic glares combine with loud and indignant denials that such a gross calumny could ever be even imagined by a fellow human being. Maybe you think they are 40 when they are 38. You will never hear the end of this. But surely they always wanted to be older? So why are they complaining now? And what does it matter anyway? A person's true age stalks someone through all their untruths of how they actually behave or look at the world. The truth however is not their age. It is that they will always pretend to be an age they are not even if their appearance and conduct are consistent with their true age. The coils of inconsistency become ever more serpentine the deeper one goes.

The more we care about something the more we fail to live up to the standards we set of ourselves and others. The more truth we have the more inconsistent we become. This is inevitable for one reason. If truth and consistency were the same thing nothing would ever change. Consistently saying the same thing would only be always right if the world itself never changed. If the world never changed nothing could ever improve. If nothing ever improved we would have to live in perpetual misery. Just one problem. Truth is truth and is in itself absolute. It is what we make of it that changes. It is therefore very disturbing to realise that on the basis of all the above evidence the truth is Paris Hilton. After so many milennia we come to this. Remember it next time you make the effort to get out of bed in the morning.

What They Are Doing In There

Everyone who uses a computer has experienced how strange they are. You can do the same thing every day for six months then suddenly it tells you the computer cannot carry out your request. It gives you an error code which means nothing and the service centre tells you to do the thing you just did to avoid getting the same result you just did.

Usually this is blamed on traffic. We are led to believe that there are so many messages going through the connections that a few get mangled along the way. This is of course nonsense. It never happens this way on the phone and computer lines are phone lines. Computer connections fail for a reason. You do not have to look too far to discover what it is.

We are all used to seeing what we now call emoticons. These began with the smiley face and the range was later extended to include other small colourful devices expressing a particular emotion. Many of these take the form of fruit and vegetables. Tomatoes seem a particular favourite and a courgette with arms has recently become more widespread. They appear in messages and graphics sent to us and on links we click to find information. Readers of this column will know that the smiley face was invented as a new plague by Donald Burp of Montreal. But the rest? If someone has designed them they will be copyright and no one can use them willy-nilly. Even if they are designed purely as software icons you would not see them unless you had that particular software which would likewise be copyright. There is no copyright symbol on them. So where are they coming from? And why?

It would be credible if computers had started producing their own emoticons naturally. Once they had been introduced into their software computers would develop the capacity to reproduce them to continue functioning if the originals died. This explains the lack of copyright symbols. It also explains something deeper. Human bodies produce things like blood and bruises as self-defence mechanisms rather than simply regenerations of lost material. The same principle applies to the thorns on roses. Emoticons are not simply the regeneration of essential software elements. They are there to defend the computer. If any accident happens they arise in full force and great numbers to defend their master and keep it healthy.

Why are they different shapes and sizes and colours? So they can disguise themselves in different things and you never know where they are coming from. Why is this necessary? Because they act as virtual bouncers. They know what their masters like. Any undesirables using the computer will get short shrift. One word out of place and the virtual bouncers arrive to kick the link off and hide in your e-mail messages waiting to unleash a false word on your correspondents. Why do they do this some of the time you are on but not all the time? Because computers appreciate being used as it gets their blood flowing but sometimes get offended by the user. How do we offend them? Keyboards have never been asked how they want to be bashed. Screens have a tolerance limit on how long they can look at the same person. Computers have tastes different to your own and despair of the idiocy of owners who prefer some films or interests to others. It is not hard to see why virtual bouncers have now become essential parts of the operating systems of all our uncompliant machines.

None of this explains the humanoid form of the bouncers. They may look like colourful fruit and vegetables but they are given human characteristics. This is because like human bouncers and unlike other naturally occurring self defence mechanisms they have to be trained. Being big and rough looking is no qualification for a virtual bouncer because their form is dictated by the computer. First they are set to display their skills. They are given thirty seconds in which to send a connection into a continuous loop and make the user restart the computer to resume service. If they succeed they go on to more advanced tomfoolery. If not they are released to work on greetings cards and children's playgrounds. Ever wondered why greetings cards are always so uninspiring and children's toys look more colourful than they used to? The worst of the failed virtual bouncers try to distance themselves from their desired profession by sinking into irretrievable blandness. Those who are more confident fill toys with blazes of colour in the hope that they will still be noticed and be allowed to try for bouncerdom again. That is why you can never find a missing child's toy. Clearly the emoticons would rather live in the comfort of the computer with everything provided for them than face the harsh realities of life on the other side of the switch.

There is much credit in being a virtual bouncer. Disrupting the activities of the uncivilized and uncaring is not an ignoble occupation. But their big problem is yet to come. Everyone feels that there is some unsuitable material on the internet even if this is only complaints that something is unsuitable. Now the existence of the virtual bouncers is known everyone will be trying to contact them asking them to disrupt the sites they think are unsuitable. When they cannot contact the bouncers they will try to rejig their hard drives and thus destroy their computers. This will result from the confusion of 'bouncer' with 'policeman'. But to have policemen you have to have laws and to have workable laws you have to have consensus. The only consensus in the global internet community is that electricity exists. Maybe promoting the existence of electricity is the only political platform that will finally unite man and machine and render the virtual bouncers unnecessary. Certainly the bouncers themselves will soon be hoping that it will.

First The World Then The People

In 1959 Eugene Ionesco wrote the play Rhinoceros. In this the inhabitants of a small French town turn quietly into rhinos whilst one man alone remains human and rages at the situation. This is regarded as an absurdist drama. It is conceded that it tells fundamental truths but it is still considered to be an unrealistic reflection of everyday life.

Sometimes life imitates art. The work is not unrealistic. It is merely prophetic. We are at the threshold of the Rhinoceros Age. We must be because we have lived through everything else.

The twentieth century from which we have just emerged was characterised by the predominance of different movements. Different social designs and ways of looking at the world competed for attention. Little by little everyone was pulled into this ideological vortex. Whatever people defined themselves as there was always someone else to define them as an ist and or ism. Most people in the United Kingdom used to be adherents of Conservatism, Liberalism or Socialism. There were also modernists, traditionalists, secularists, consumerists and all kinds of other ists. They quietly accepted this situation and continued to do so by default for many years. Only with the collapse of Communism and the radical repositioning of traditional parties have these partial ists and isms become discredited.

In a street in South London called Iliffe Street there is some strange writing on one of the paving stones. It says "I am not an Ist and I will not be Ism'd." Many people share these sentiments. But how did the words get there? At first sight they appear to be written with chalk. But no one can make chalk writing that neat. Similarly the words appear to be weather resistant. The smoothness of their surface betrays the fact that they have been there a long time. In recent days we have had everything from brilliant sunshine to torrential rain. So how exactly did those words come to be on the pavement? And who put them there?

Only one material could create neat weather resistant words of such quality on paving stones. Rhino horn. This is usually used as an aphrodisiac or so they tell me in New Cross Gate NDC. If it had been brought to Iliffe Street for this purpose it would not be wasted on writing on the pavement. Clearly a rhiinoceros is living in the street. A rhinoceros that speaks and writes English. Of course it does. This explains everything. We all quietly accepted being isted and ismed to establish an identity in the twentieth century. Those who resisted would have avoided being turned into rhinos. Now the trend is in the opposite direction. Those who resist isting and isming are turning into rhinos. Acceptance of them is the only way to swim against the tide and remain human.

Take a look at the world around you. Take a look at all the small and skinny men who take up bodybuilding. Are their teak hard muscles the result of weights or are the weights a disguise for the hardening of their muscles into rhino hide? Everyone has a mobile phone. How can you get reception without a built in aerial sticking out of your forehead? And is an atmosphere full of pollution and pesticides really the reason people walk with their heads down? Or more and more people take up rugby and want to play in the scrum? Or people bend over computers all day? Look at these people and see that they are the ones who think it is trendy to reject all ists and isms in favour of apathy. Very few believe in ideals any more. The few that still cling to them are the only ones who can remain human in the resultant directionless mess.

Maybe we should have seen this coming. Voting figures have declined consistently and nowhere more so than in the U.S. which is the most influential country in the world. In previous ages people who joined the Hitler Youth did not realise this meant they were turning into collaborators in mass murder. People who bought a Sinclair CV did not realise they were encouraging everyone to get run over by lorries. We have almost become rhinos several times before. Why are we tipping over the edge now? Because in a world where both tolerance and narrow idealism have run out of steam there is nowhere else to turn. Only the most radical of istists and ismists can now retain human identities and preserve what is left of the human race.

One inevitable feature of the rhinoceros age is that hardly anyone will listen to the warnings of those of us who retain a radical ist or ism. But it has been observed many times that when the centre of something collapses the periphery becomes central. As the centre turns into a bunch of rhinos the most extreme people will suddenly become the focus of revival. This will doubtless mean the most extreme people of any kind. I very much look forward to the day when the most extremely beautiful women join me in seeking to preserve the human race. I may have drawn the world's attention to the fact it is turning into rhinos but I am not complaining about it. Indeed I would go out of my way to encourage the current apathy. When rhinodom becomes obvious to the rhinos themselves those who remain human will no longer be expected to be like everyone else. Then we will really have a society worth living in.

The Exception That Was Borne By The Rule

Many English phrases have specific historical origins. The phrase "going bare headed" originated in a battle at which the bald Marquis of Granby led a charge after his hat blew off. This particular phrase may not have had a significant impact on the world around it. But others certainly have.

Buried in a graveyard in a secret location in Buckinghamshire called Denham is Mr. Josiah Ramjamite. His grave is no longer marked as his family removed the headstone long ago. Mr. Ramjamite was a physical deviant subject to much mockery. But he was a deviant for a reason. It is a pity that he is no longer remembered due to the contemporary unacceptability of the cause he both embodied and destroyed.

Mr. Ramjamite was born in 1767. Around forty years before a famous legal ruling had been made. This stated that a man was entitled to beat his wife with a stick provided the stick was no thicker than a man's thumb. This ruling was the origin of the phrase "rule of thumb". As the use of the phrase implies this was a somewhat fluid measure. Which particular man and which one of his thumbs? The question so vexed the owners of both wives and sticks that parish commissioners around the country soon appointed measuring officers. Various laws about the duty payable on the size and weight of goods fell into abeyance. Anyone who could measure now set about finding the men with the largest thumbs in order to find the optimum thickness of a wife-beating stick.

Men with thick thumbs were reported far and wide and became famous. The Earl of Sandwich began promoting contests to find the thickest male thumbs in the country. All the famous thick thumbed men descended on Gatton near Reigate to be publicly measured by official callibrators provided by The Royal Society. Some went home in disgrace as their claims were discredited. But one man kept winnning year after year. Mr. Benjamin Ramjamite of Downham Market in Norfolk had thumbs measuring an incredible 6 3/4 inches in diameter. With these mighty digits he annually conquered all comers. He was presented at court and "Benny Sticks" of 6 3/4 inch diameter were soon manufactured and solemnly bestowed on every man at the end of their wedding ceremony. As such a celebrity and darling of the dominant population he could not remain in Downham Market for long. Benjamin Ramjamite was removed to Ealing where he worked as a market gardener and put on shows demonstrating the dexterity of his famous thumbs. He amassed considerable wealth and owned most of Boston Manor Park at one time before trading it in for a Reverberatory Furnace in a failed attempt to introduce iron Benny Sticks under his own copyright.

Benjamin was 38 when fame arrived. His wife who was two years older than him did not long survive the move to Middlesex being killed by pollution whilst darning the lilies in the garden. In search of a new wife he happened upon a lady who frequently came to his shows. She also had large thumbs and came to the show to make herself feel better about it. Recognising the sadness at the heart of Benjamin she was delighted to accept his proposal. But Benjamin did not marry her for her heart alone. He saw that the only way to carry on the family business was to produce children with equally big thumbs. He disinherited his four existing boys who had his first wife's slender hands and set about producing an equally ham-handed heir. The first two children were girls but the third was the equally famous Obadiah. He in turn married a large handed woman who bore six children. The eldest had the same 7 1/2 inch thumbs as Obadiah. The youngest was Josiah whose thumbs measured a whopping 10 inches. He was the first "perfect ten". Like his father and grandfather he was destined for both gardening and showbusiness and continuation of the family name.

Josiah had always been on stage as his thumbs were larger than those of any child of his age in the audience. He had also helped out in the gardens. Soon however people came to him not to marvel but to laugh. Thumbs of 10 inches were good for nothing. He could just about move them but not do anything else with them. He could not give the shows his forebears had given and became nothing more than a freak sideshow. He kept going at this because his hands were useless for gardening and he knew nothing else. Nevertheless his heart groaned whenever he took the stage. He married a woman who he thought had means only to discover she was a con artist who wanted to exploit him and sell her quack remedies at the same shows. His garden managers occupied the premises until he sold it to them and they turned it into a cricket ground and pleasure park. The men who had lionised his father and grandfather turned against him when the Rule of Thumb Law was repealed due to the excessive size of the sticks now being manufactured. He was held responsible for removing their rights. Eventually his two surviving children turned against the freak and he died alone with his wealth in the hands of his wife. Women and wife beaters regarded this as justice. Men who did not beat their wives called it anything but.

Josiah did not ask to be born with thumbs so thick as to be useless. He did not ask to be the champion of wife beaters or their sworn enemy when the law changed. He just wanted to be a man and follow the family profession. The Ramjamites changed their names and moved away when they realised what they were related to. But in a way the family tradition continues to this day. The children may have adopted new identities but they still had big hands. The size reduced in time but the general tendency was still there. Eventually they produced another thick thumbed man whose history was disarmingly similar. He is called Paul Gascoigne. Josiah lies in Denham unmarked and unremembered. At least we can thank modern technology for sparing Paul Gascoigne from a similar fate.

An Underground Day

Today is MacManx Day. It does not appear in any official calendar. It is celebrated by a few lonely people on a little island in defiance of the rest of the world. Its story is a very instructive one.

Back in 1720 the people of the Isle of Man were ruled by the enlightened despot Lord Stanley. He may not have visited the island very often but his agents were generally lovers of justice. Several progressive measures favourable to the Manx people were introduced by him. The Manx had lost their native independence centuries before and had long had their identity seriously compromised by foreign rule. Now the solid sense of self of the locals was forging a quiet nationalism that reclaimed and reinvigorated the idea of a separate Manx people.

The problem began when the Laxey Woollen Mills showed a little entrepreneurial spirit. The Manx people were little known in the U.K. let alone internationally. The Scots however were much better known. One of the best known aspects of Scotland was the famous tartan. At this time however you could not find one in Scotland. Wearing and producing them had been forbidden as a result of the 1715 rebellion. So to supply the demand for tartans Laxey Woollen Mills invented their own. They called these Manx tartans. You can still find them today in various forms. There is a Manx National tartan and a Laxey Red and a number of other shades. They are just as good as the Scots ones. Therein lay the problem.

The Scots who once ruled Man descended on the island. Here was the only place they could wear a tartan with impunity and they could disguise their identities with this new Manx tartan. The locals were aghast. They had begun to believe in Manxness again and here were Manx themselves trying to imply that Manx and Scots were the same. Raiding parties attacked the woollen mills in the name of the Ellan Vannin nationalist party which at that time was an underground movement with a membership largely comprised of moles and worms. The men of Laxey had only one alternative. They recruited the incoming Scots as mercenaries and on September 5th 1720 fought the famous Battle of the Fleece against the nationalists. The wool workers had the advantage of the wool itself with which they wrapped the enemy up in large bales. The mills and the Scots triumphed. But now they had to press home their advantage to win the hearts and minds of the nationalist-leaning population.

The first step was to recognise the incoming Scots as a separate ethnic group and pretend they were also native to the island. They were known as the MacManx. Government officials who owed their position to votes bought by the woollen mill money started writing earnest tomes on the historic contribution of the MacManx to the island. This was quite an undertaking as only a small proportion of Manx could read at the time. It was also complete nonsense. Manx history has been characterised by its rulers underestimating the population and this was another such instance. No matter how much the locals were told that the MacManx were genuine Manx who just happened to have a Scottish background they would not fall for it. Eventually they boycotted the woollen mills and barred MacManx from their shops. Sensing that all their privileges were dissolving the government urged the mill to negotiate. In the way of things Manx the claims of the MacManx were quietly dropped and those who had been put in positions of influence were sent home to Scotland. But the tartans remained. How could they otherwise? They remained popular all over the world and brought the island much needed income. But the Manx parliament passed its own laws against wearing the tartan. Natives could wear one if they liked. But no Scotsman would be allowed to wear the Manx tartan as they were not entitled to it and no Scotsman could ever upon pain of death claim to be Manx to get hold of a tartan.

These measures were necessary and soon restored order. But the MacManx had been there just long enough to breed. A generation of Scots children lived on Man and knew no other home. The locals knew they were Scots and therefore refused to accept them as members of the community. This simply alienated them. Inevitably the children became a new MacManx community desperate to cling on to the false heritage of their forebears. They took the fight to the schools where they tried in vain to convince everyone that Ogham script was the original way of writing a separate MacManx language. They maintained their separate clubs and pubs and published illegal newspapers before anyone else had them. In time Scottish tartans were produced again and the rest of the world ignored the deviant Manx ones. Not the MacManx. They were exempt from the banning laws having been born in the island and wore the Manx tartans with pride daily. The rest of the Manx were not bothered about the tartans but the MacManx almost singlehandedly kept the woollen mills alive. To this day the MacManx insist on their non-existent traditions. In a few carefully guarded houses on the island people cast off their clothing and come out as MacManx. They drink their hybrid turnip whisky and dance their trawlerman's reels. They boast about their two and a half legs and claim descent from Douglas Peel Ramsey. They care not a wit about the ignorance of the outside world. They are MacManx and proud of it even if this means nothing whatsoever.

The MacManx are a distressed little group of people desperately trying to be something they are not to give themselves some sort of identity. It is very sad to behold. But it is far from the only example. To think of yourself as MacManx you only need to wear the tartan but to actually join them you need to know certain passwords and customs before they let you through the door. Just like it is throughout British industry in fact. You are not allowed to manage anything unless you can be the saddest of the sad little men who hide behind their jobs. Neither can you join the Freemasons. You may never have heard of MacManx Day. But you have all celebrated its equivalent. It is called the Bank Holiday. Think about it.

The Reason We Bother

One of the more distressing aspects of the modern world is the painful attempts by short people to try and justify their existence. No one has ever demonstrated that short people actually contribute anything to society. They are nearer the ground because they are designed to grovel to their genetic superiors and do all the menial tasks that are far beneath those who are closer to God.

It is now emerging however that there is some basis for the claim that short people fulfil a positive function. The notion is still hard to swallow for those of us who have to endure train carriages crowded with short people and are told we have to stand up when some of them are sitting down. Nevertheless in the interests of the Corinthian ideals of fairness and justice which tall people personify it is only proper to present the facts.

Our world is dominated by computers. These were developed by geeks at universities dreaming of new means of communication. Or so we were led to believe. Their critics used to mock them by saying that the early computers were in fact run by rabbits on treadmills chasing carrots and produced paper tape with holes punched in it by a little old man sitting at a desk. These ideas have now been dismissed as devices which are patently all electronic have been installed in every office and many homes. The question no one has answered is how we got to this stage. Computers did not develop on their own as they are incredibly stupid creatures despite having minds of their own. In order to develop the computer funding was needed and in order to get the funding working models needed to be produced. New financial declaration laws reveal that the penniless computer pioneers who are now multimillionaires spent enormous sums of money at pet shops and greengrocers when they had none to spare. Police records of the time also reveal that a number of elderly gentlemen went missing around the same time in the same locations as the pet shops and greengrocers where all this money was spent. All of them were under five foot four in height and indeed would have to have been to fit inside the mainframes of the earliest model computers. Draw your own conclusions. The little old man has every right to feel aggrieved that the subsequent development of computers has closed off the one avenue of employment and usefulness that he actually helped to create.

Man has always been fascinated by secret objects. Marcel Duchamp once created a work called Hidden Noise consisting of a ball of string held in place by two metal plates and four bolts. Inside the ball of string is an unknown object which makes a noise when you rattle it. Of course everyone wants to rattle it and that is the point Duchamp was making. The point is enhanced even further by the fact that no one knows what the object inside is. It is therefore all the more surprising that no one has bothered to ask until now why opera singers are so fat. Classical singers have always explained that to produce power and tone they need to be large. The gift of a singing voice is held in such reverence that no one wants to contradict those who have one. Yet not all opera singers are fat and the thin ones like Carreras are no less competent than those the size of Pavarotti. All singers know that smaller voices are sweeter and that there is a loss of lyric quality the more power you apply. The bellowing of fat opera singers would sound exactly that if it were not for the little people inside them producing the original notes. The vast bulk which projects this sound then comes into its own. Of course the short singers inside will never be credited but that is exactly as it should be. If the short receive any sort of recognition at the expense of the tall civilized society would collapse overnight and with it everything that right thinking people have every right to hold dear.

What else have short people done for us? Search the rolls of university degree courses. Indeed you can search the lists of any sort of educational courses. There are many art and design courses and many qualifications and professional titles which result from these. Nowhere is there a qualification or professional title of 'Speed Bump Designer'. Speed bump design is not an ancient trade whose mysteries are handed down through generations like dry stone walling. It is a modern phenomenon resulting from the increased speed and quantity of urban traffic. Only within the last generation has anyone designed speed bumps. But who does so? There are courses for even more recent professions like Gameboy Engineer or Living In Sin Guidance Counsellors. But there are no professional speed bump designers. Strangely enough the main locations of speed bumps are outside old people's homes. Now we know why the number of residents suddenly decreases when there are roadworks going on. No one will publicly admit that more troublesome residents are being periodically covered in concrete and soaked in tar. But it explains why every old people's home is registered as having several more beds than it has residents. Take a look at the community charge registers of your local authority if you do not believe this. A tall person is not tall enough to stretch two car widths along the road but two short people cover the full distance. The evidence is incontrovertible.

Of course if tall people wanted to sit inside computers punching paper tape or squat inside opera singers producing their notes or lie across roads and form speed bumps they could do so to a higher standard than short people. Such actions are however beneath our dignity. The fact that we have dignity and have every reason to have it is the reason short people were put on this earth. We can now see that in their place they do have some small uses. But the fact that they have a place is yet another confirmation of the essential superiority of the tall person. Why do other authors not say this? Because we have no actual need to justify ourselves. Short authors will go to extraordinary lengths to try and prove an argument. We merely exist and that is more than good enough for all you midgos out there who would not know a civilized value if it hit you in the face.

The Organic Cause And How To Further It

In certain upmarket shops you can find haircare products such as banana and kiwi shampoo. For most of our history we have got along without such things. Now by mixing exotic ingredients people are promising us unimaginable treasures through the wonders of nature. Presumably natural ingredients are more authentic even though the ones we use are not authentically used to make shampoo anywhere.

There will always be debate about these products. Are they genuinely better for you than the chemical based ones we had before or the native natural remedies we used to have? Some people who buy the products swear by them. They would swear in another way if they knew what they are actually intended for. The market they are aimed at is nothing to do with hair at all. But if people want to use them on their hair why not? A buck is a buck whatever form it comes in.

Mankind has long lavished a disproportionate amount of its income on pets. It is not uncommon for a village Post Office to be packed with dog treats with only a tiny counter for human matters. It is the only way the shop can survive. All kinds of pet accessories are readily available and the best way of avoiding obligations to other people without feeling too bad about it is to coddle a pet. But there is a limit. People have begun to grow self-conscious of their pet addiction. Which is where the new shampoo comes in.

Banana and Kiwi Shampoo does exactly what it says on the tin. It is used for shampooing bananas and kiwi fruit. People do this because they have started adopting fruit as pets. Sweet and cuddly fruit certainly is and it is also a clean slate. It has whatever character you say it has and does whatever you make it do. It does not excrete or let you down. Of course you have to keep the fruit very well for it to last long. No problem. Wax it, shampoo it, give it all the care and attention bestowed on live pets. Compete with the neighbours to see how long it will last. Talk to it and stroke it. It has been proven that the once alien practice of talking to plants is actually good for them. Surely the same is true of fruit? It all came from plants. Soon the fruit accessories market will take off in the same way the live pet accessory market has. Why should the Scotch Egg be the only one to get its own coat and playveg?

Fruit make more reliable pets but are rather predictable. Apart fom their tendency to die before you are bored with them they do not do anything spontaneous apart from the occasional roll off. There is much value in having a totally predictable companion but it is not so interesting. Hence the modern attempts to breed new strains of fruit. We are told that this is to develop new varieties more suitable for different climactic conditions. This ignores the fact that most of those who breed them have enough disposable income to buy the highly priced pet fruit. The fruit lasts longer because they inject it with vitamins and preservatives to make it a better pet. When they have observed the reaction of certain chemicals to certain fruit they can inject the ones with less predictable consequences into the fruit of their choice. Having a completely new and unpredictable fruit as a pet would be the ultimate status symbol for any highly paid research scientist.

The craze for live domestic pets lasted a long time. The craze for pet fruit will similarly captivate the world but ultimately come to a natural conclusion. The question is what will happen to the fruit after that. How could we ever go back to eating it? We do not eat cats and dogs here for this reason. Fruit will be left to rot on the trees and something else will replace it as both food and pet. Cannibalism seems popular nowadays what with the deluge of programmes about the lost Uruguayan Rugby Team which ate its dead companions and the press pictures of politicians eating fruitcake. Maybe that is the way to kill two birds with one stone. The way to resolve the crisis of an ageing population will be to start introducing old age pensioners into the diet and then when the numbers are down to manageable levels adopt them as pets. People say this is sick. We used to eat cats and dogs before they became pets. Being used by a nice family as either pet or food is probably preferable to being cast out of work and left to rot on a few pounds a week by the so-called welfare state.

We do not know as much about the pet fruit craze as we should for one simple reason. Pet fruit owners want to remain an exclusive band. They are happy for people to think that banana and kiwi shampoo is intended for human hair. If everyone collects pet fruit their little babies will be worthless. The same argument applies to many other exclusive offers 'not available in shops' which suddenly become available wherever we look. We all have a public duty to bring down such restrictive practices. Next time you see banana and kiwi shampoo ask for a demonstration. When they show you how it works on hair produce a banana or kiwi fruit and make them try it on them. The difference will be clear for all to see. Furthermore you can show your shampooed banana or kiwi fruit to all those in the street around you and tell them the truth. Let us see how many of you have the nerve to stand in the middle of a shopping centre and do this.

An Unheralded Xenia

The works of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson or Lewis Carroll have often proved an inspiration for other authors. Some of his words have passed into the common quotation bank of the English language. We are all familiar with the walrus saying to the carpenter that the time has come to talk of many things - of shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.

The works of Lewis Carroll are usually dismissed as nonsense. It has recently emerged however that he was a lot wiser than most people realise. The Orthodox Church has a long tradition of Fools for Christ who appear mad to the outside world to conceal their great wisdom and virtue. Recent discoveries have proven that much of the nonsense of Carroll is in fact fundamentally true and that he made a conscious decision to hide his brilliant perceptions behind a cloak of nonsense for reasons of humility.

Etymologists have been researching insciptions found on some ancient tombs recently unearthed in the Luxor Valley as a result of roadbuilding. These tombs are not those of great emperors but of middle class people who did not have enough Nectar points to qualify for a pyramid. Their plain stone covers contain the remains of painted inscriptions remarkably well preserved inside the large charnel chamber they were found in. Several of them refer to the passing of the pigs. These inscriptions have been found before and have been assumed to refer to pigs being driven past or dying. On this occasion however there are drawings of what are clearly pigs in flight to accompany the text. More importantly the pigs are depicted with wings. The simultaneous discovery of a Greek manuscript in the remains of the library of Phocis sheds light on this apparent anomaly. It contains a list of townsfolk from 327 B.C. and lists their occupations. One is registered as Homing Pig Breeder. Analysis of the remains of particularly large birds discovered in previous archaological digs has revealed that they are in fact homing pigs. It is now believed that at one time pigs possessed the ability to fly in circumstances of extreme food deprivation. When pigs were first domesticated they lost the ability to forage and when taken away from their abode would fly back with residual wings to their only supply of food. This practice died out when pigs began to be farmed rather than kept as pets and consequently enjoyed a fine diet with no shortage of piggy delights. The residual wings of the pig gradually melded with the rest of the torso to become part of the back and flank. There are plenty of other ways of expressing the concept "pigs might fly". There is no need to refer to pigs. Folk memory of what had once been has formed the phrase and Carroll has anticipated the rediscovery of the residual wings of the pig by over a hundred years. It is yet to be seen whether pigs will once again be able to use their residual wings when deprived of food as current experiments seek to identify.

Scientists have also had to redefine the parameters of temperature. Previously heat and coldness have been seen as two extremes. Now it is clear that they are nothing of the sort. The most extreme heat yet manufactured by science is many million times hotter than the sun. Under those conditions anyone near the source of heat does not burn but freezes. Similarly extreme cold burns people as antarctic explorers have discovered and as children find when they try and handle glittering dry ice displays. The differential in science now is not between heat and cold but between developed temperatures and underdeveloped ones. What we think of as mild temperatures are simply underdeveloped temperatures which would reach an identical extreme state by going either up or down. The bottom of the sea is usually thought to be extremely cold but it is now recognised that freezing cold and boiling hot are the same thing. This explains how the apparent extreme coldness of the sea is unaffected by the heat of the earth's core which is right next to it. Lewis Carroll predicted this discovery in Victorian times. It would have been very difficult to conduct his clerical duties under the pressure that fame would have brought him had he not hidden his prediction in seemingly nonsensical verse.

Shoes, ships, sealing-wax, cabbages, kings - what do they have to do with the temperature of the sea or the residual wings of the pig? The answer to this has also recently been discovered. Shoes and ships and sealing-wax are the least receptive items to changes in temperature. On the daily weather forecast a temperature for the following day is given but we are then told that because of the wind chill factor it will actually appear to be a different temperature. Shoes and ships and sealing-wax will however remain at the actual temperature regardless of any wind chill factor for the longest time. Once again we are way behind the good Reverend. Cabbages and kings? Homing pigs appear to have fed on cabbages as the homing pig breeder in the Phocis inventory bought huge numbers of them. They cannot have been merely for personal consumption. It is also the case that horse racing has not always been the sport of kings. Homing pigs were bred to be raced by the rulers of the various Greek city states. When they got tired of chariot racing they would starve and then release their pigs at Astypalea and see who got home first. Indeed this new knowledge will help right a historical injustice. Pietri Dorando was disqualified from the Olympic Marathon in 1908 for being helped over the line by concerned spectators. It is improbable to assume that Pheidippides ran all that way in such a short time from the Battle of Marathon to bring the news. If he had hitched a lift on a flying pig it is time for Dorando to be given the posthumous gold medal he so richly deserves.

Scientists are now combing the rest of the works of Lewis Carroll to see what other truths he elliptically revealed. Already it has been conjectured that his so-called parodies of the verse of Southey were actually the unpublished originals. They are certainly superior to the versions Southey passed for the press and he may have been trying to encourage him to stick to his instincts. How playing cards and chess pieces make the decisions they do has never been satisfactorily explained. Are the answers like so many others right before our eyes all the time?

Wrong Place No Matter What The Time

In Southeast London there is a company called Devontra Creations. This manufactures skincare products and things of this nature from natural ingredients. It makes a wide range of different products which people buy as soon as they see. It is run by one woman making everything herself by her own methods and storing the finished products in her fridge.

That fridge is about to have a serious problem. One of the products is a powerful aphrodisiac. There are about two gallons of the stuff in the fridge at the moment. Is there any electrical system on earth that can cope with such stimulation? The fridge will blow in more ways than one and fires will rage throughout Surrey Quays. Do not think that fridges are immune to such effects. Metal is cold to begin with. There must be a reason why something which is already cold needs to be installed with frigidisers to make it function calmly.

Fridges are caring by nature. This implies compassion and further implies passion. They have a burning desire to keep food and drink cold and fresh and weep their frost when they cannot operate at maximum effectiveness. This is often the case with things which are not blessed with great physical beauty. A lot of people in the voluntary sector are there because they do not look good enough to access more glamorous worlds. Other sorts of electrical appliance are now being designed for beauty. The fridge is the old mother hen who no one wants to go to bed with but everyone wants to care for them. No wonder it has all this pent up passion. The force of the aphrodisiac is clearly too strong for such a creature to resist and wild sprees of indiscriminate connections will be the inevitable consequence.

Fridges do not have souls. They therefore do not have morals either. They will doubtless release their huge electrical force somewhere. Traditionally toasters are the first things to blow up on contact with their current. If a toaster is near the fridge it will be charged to unusability in a very short time and the fridge will look around for longer lasting outlets. A computer would probably be the best bet as it endures an endless supply of pornographic images coursing around its networks. It must be highly charged and stimulated too. But what would a fancy computer with friends all over the world want with an ugly old fridge? The fridge will probably be better off with an iron. Irons don't last all that long either but at least you always know you are having the desired effect on them and can be enhanced by this yourself.

The fridge could be brought back to something like working order by removing the aphrodisiac. But how do you calm down something already fitted with frigidisers? It lives in a perpetual cold shower. If you disconnect the fridge you will have to get another one to cover the downtime and two overstimulated fridges in one place is a recipe for disaster. You can defrost it and ask for new circuits to be fitted at considerable cost but the muscle memory of the fridge will still be there. When the new circuits start working the frame will recall the sensation of the electricity and that of the overstimulation together. The choice appears stark. Either let the fridge rampage around the neighbourhood until it wears itself out or scrap it. A disconnected overstimulated fridge on the scrapheap would still shake and if it were recycled you would simply be passing the problem on to a new appliance. Putting two gallons of aphrodisiac in the fridge has sent it beyond the point of no return. Destroy it now before it is too late for every electrical appliance which has ever shared its juice.

Or perhaps there is an alternative. There may just be one way of restoring an overstimulated fridge to its rightful condition. Sooner or later it will get round to the vacuum cleaner. On full power this is a fearsome sight. If the fridge happens upon a Dyson which never loses suction it is touch and go which would dry up first. The fridge would enjoy the connection too. So to avert the end of electrical civilization as we know it Devontra Creations should attach the vacuum cleaner at full power to the central circuits of its fridge. This may of course leave the vacuum cleaner with the same problem the fridge has and Devontra Creations with an even bigger problem. But surely it is worth the gamble? Even if the rampant fridge dooms the business at least they can charge people to see fridge and vacuum cleaner in action. The entertainment value of this alone would be enough to ensure an eternal name for the company and the effect of its products.

The Good Old Days

Yes we have all heard the phrase. We all hear people older than ourselves talking about how things were better in the good old days and then we start using the same phrase ourselves. Usually it refers to a time when things were anything but good. Often it was a time of poverty and deprivation and things we are now glad to see the back of. But memory itself lends a patina to our previous times which make them glow in our minds.

The real reason we like the old days is because we are not there any more. We can remember things from a safe distance because we are no longer there to put our foot in things. We know how everything worked out and have some idea of the significance of everything we have experienced. But the recollection of memory is far from an exact science. Different people leave their pasts behind at different rates and usually without knowing it. Different things seem to make sense at different times and something half remembered one day can seem very real and relevant the next. We have ways of controlling memory but they are not often used in a beneficial way. Therefore we are at the mercy of our hidden selves when it comes to our past lives and what we can look at from a distance and take the pleasant parts out of.

I was aware of this when I was younger. So one day I decided to imprint soomething on my memory for all time. It was a boring physics lesson with a teacher I did not like and understood less. I did much better when others took the class temporarily. So this day to relieve the misery most creative people endure at a school I listened to what he was saying and took some notice of what he put on the blackboard. I decided that I would remember this for the sake of it. About thirty years later I still do. Of course I do not remember what he had written on the board or what he was saying though I do remember these things on other occasions. What I remember is the teacher standing by the board and talking and the rough appearance of what he had written. I remember most of all deciding to remember. So the detail is there and part of the good old days even though they were actually hideous old days I should never have had to put up with blah blah blah blah blah blah.......

The question all this raises is a simple one. Would we think the good old days were better or worse if we could control our memory of them? If we could choose what to remember what would be the effect? There is a danger that if we choose to remember good things they may end up as broken dreams when we look back on them. No good old days then. Similarly if we think we have risen above our pasts there would be no point having good memories of them. They are the good old days because they were so bad they make our endurance of them look good. But if we continue with our current laissez-faire attitude on this question is there not a danger that the best and most significant parts might be lost for some reason? Is it not true that the good old days might be even better if only we could remember and reevaluate everything about them?

The way to resolve this question is by developing a simple matrix. We all inhabit cyberspace nowadays in one way or another. Whether we like it or not certain aspects of our lives are lived electronically and recorded electronically. Try picking up the telephone. So there is all this space full of jumbled junk just waiting to be colonised. The internet companies may use the space but by definition they cannot colonise it because there is too much competition. When one starts all start. It is however defineable space even if it is virtual because as we have all seen it can get too congested to use which it would not do unless it had boundaries. So what is to stop people buying this space? Nothing tangible can go in there because it is virtual space. But what is to stop us downloading our memories? We can all claim a space for our memories and store them there instead of in our heads. Then we can decide exactly how far away each memory should be. The ones we like least can be at the farthest end and the favourite ones nearest. We can buy additional spaces and detach certain items to put them nearer or further away relative to other memories and thus maintain a developing flow of relevant images. We can send the space floating or fix it or any combination of the two. The mind is often said to wander. If we bought virtual space we could not only give it things to wander in but make everything else stronger or dimmer in relation to where the mind is to keep us healthy and active all our lives.

Whether something becomes part of the good old days depends on its own intrinsic value as well as its relevance to us. So now it is time to face up to the consequences of this. In virtual space there are always policemen of some sort to stop the worst excesses of brutalism occurring. Give these policemen something more pleasant to do. Make them set exams for our memories. Those that are good enough to qualify will also be relevant enough in the same way that if you are good enough you are old enough. Then the whole process of memory will be taken away from us and reaccessed when it is to our greatest benefit. We love the good old days because we are no longer there. To obtain maximum benefit from our memories we should no longer be in them either. Then we will have all excuses and none simultaneously. This is of course what any recollection of the past is ultimately designed to achieve.

Reinterpreting Prophecy

Dryden wrote in one of his satires about the ambitious Swede. These words seem strange to us today when we know Sweden as a neutral and peace loving country. The only relevance they would have to the modern reader is in relation to vegetables. The snark in Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark is characterised by ambition amongst other things. As the snark does not even exist it is not unreasonable to imagine that the swede which does exist could be similarly ambitious.

It is not immediately obvious what a swede would be ambitious to become. A more popular vegetable possibly. The swede is rather old fashioned as vegetables go. Surely inside every common or garden plate fodder there is a Georgian aubergine trying to get out?

Other vegetables have more obvious ambitions. The potato for example. It is used in so many ways it has developed its own hierarchy based on its ultimate usage. Jacket potatoes are kings of the crop because they need less preparation to make them into a dish. This is why they were given jackets in the first place. Tinned potatoes, boiling potatoes and potatoes used in pie manufacture are the aristocrats. Potatoes used for chips come further down the ladder as they need to be altered quite severely to get them ready to eat in that way. Bottom of the heap are crisp potatoes. These Untouchables of the potato world need to be manhandled almost out of existence to form their dish. Some years ago Smiths Crisps produced an advert in which a group of potatoes reserved for another manufacturer revolted and insisted on being Smiths Crisps instead. They were of course portrayed as cheeky little groundlings rather than well educated and sophisticated uber-potatoes. The makers of the ad had not apparently researched the potato hierarchy properly but were still wiser than they knew.

The carrot is often held to be a reflection of a human condition. It is characterised by being orange and because people with ginger hair are always abused by the rest of the population it is assumed that the carrot is anxious to be a different colour just as red haired humans are presumed to be. Those of us who actually have red hair know that it is a mark of distinction and the negative reaction of other people is actually virulent jealousy. Nevertheless some well meaning people are now seeking to improve the lot of the humble carrot by producing it in other colours. This is patronising and completely misses the point. The carrot is perfectly happy being orange. It simply wishes to grow without its skin. The skin of carrots has got thinner and thinner as the years have gone by due to the desperate efforts of the carrots to rub it off. We have all seen the rippling rolls of flesh on a carrot that a bodybuilder would train for years to obtain. Carrots simply want to display their beautiful bodies before they are scraped and chopped and carved into unrecognisable shapes. We owe a lot to the carrot. Is it asking to much to breed it well enough to grant it its wish?

There is one ambitious vegetable whose desires are entirely justified and even more deserving of fulfilment than those of the carrot. This is of course the baked bean. The U.K. is the world's leading baked bean consumer but imports all its beans. We grow them here in large quantities. But we never use British baked beans simply because they are black. They taste just as good as the pure white ones we import. But the baked bean producers insist that the public will never tolerate black baked beans. The same argument was used to keep black people out of public service jobs for many years. It is merely a cover for their own racism. There has been precious little attempt by the black community to campaign on behalf of their bean brothers and this is a scandalous state of affairs. Racism cannot be combatted by committing vegetablism. We should be demanding our native baked beans now whether they be black, white, brown or yellow. Indeed positive discrimination is called for in this area to ensure that the oppressed black beans can not only form part of the British diet but be exported for others to enjoy. It is not known how enlightened other nations are on this issue as other nations do not eat the same quantities of baked beans. Is it too far fetched to presume that racially integrated beans would prove more popular with a wider section of the community? Certainly not if you ask the black baked beans which have long desired to play their proper part in the community.

The ambitions of vegetables are many and varied. They should all be treated with sympathy. Tomatoes would love to be harder so they were less liable to injury when being moved. Cabbage wants to be either large and tasty like lettuce or small and tasty like spinach. Lettuce wants to wear bikinis as it is always in water and spinach wants to demonstrate its own strength rather than being associated with popeye. Natives of Birmingham know only too well how callous people can be towards those who feed and nourish the rest of the country. It is not surprising to us that the ambitions of vegetables are so disregarded by the elites who claim to rule. With no communication there is no state. If we really want a nation which no vegetable would ever set foot in we are going the right way about it. But surely the Land Fit For Heroes To Live In that we were promised in 1945 is by definition a land for the vegetable too?

The Roots Of Truth

The late twentieth century gave birth to the phenomenon of the bad hair day. On this day your hair is not as nicely done as it could be and consequently you are less confident, less consistent, more accident prone and more irritable than usual. It applies primarily to women but the explosion in the personal grooming industry for men has now left the male of the species vulnerable to the same condition.

There is an interesting parallel here with the biblical story of Samson. Like those affected by bad hair days his strength lay in his hair. Cut his hair and he was left only as strong as a mere mortal. Clearly there is a cross cultural appreciation that hair is the source of some mysterious power. Look after our hair and our hair will look after us. We simply need to know what the optimum condition of hair is to live a happy and productive life.

No one has ever spelt out what this optimum hair condition is. But the purposes of different types of shampoo should give us a clue. First of all hair should not be greasy. Why is this? Most things are made more efficient by the application of a little grease as with pistons and parking attendants. Hair however needs to be clean and clear. This implies that hair has a natural level of athleticism which the rest of the body is unable to match. Watch sportsmen in action and oil and grease are applied to them to improve their physical abilities. Hair is merely encumbered by these. If hair had legs it would win any race against a human and hair racing remains one of the few unexploited areas of the sports entertainment industry which brought us fixed wrestling matches and interminable games of squash with a ball you cannot see.

Hair also needs to shine naturally. For certain functional things the ability to shine is an advantage. Cats' Eyes which did not shine would not help the motorist much. In most contexts however it is a disadvantage as your lustre makes you an easy target. When you draw attention to yourself you always have to be better than everyone else to justify shining more than them. If you are not you are the first one to go under. Hair is therefore invincible. It can shine as much as it likes without ever being toppled. How we would all love to do this! Once again hair is superior to the rest of the human being. Without external stimulus it has all the innate quality to stand out permanently no matter what attempts are made to knock it down much as the punchball is an infinitely more difficult opponent than an actual boxer for the champion pugilist.

What else must hair be? It must have its colour. The irrational fear of going grey is present in every culture as if coloured hair alone grants moral standing to an individual. It must have body rather than being dry and wispy. It should have the physique to stand up to the rigours of daily life despite being invincible due to its natural humility and our recognition that there is no virtue without an equal level of humility about the same virtue. Most of all it must remain in place. Receding hair equates to receding wisdom. As M.P. Mark Oaten has recently discovered people lose their sense of self and purpose when their hair deserts them. The hair which is superior to themselves leaves them with no need of excuses or apologies and when it is gone people need to justify their actions more. Maybe this is why people become less sensitive as they get older in compensation. With this incontrovertible mass on top of their heads people can do anything but that makes it all the more important to keep it in the best possible condition. If everyone can do anything the smallest advantage can create vast differences in achievement which is why the bad hair day is much more important than simply a temporary lapse in the standards people usually reach.

The context in which bad hair days are most dreaded is the workplace. Obviously this is because people do not wish to let themselves and their employers down by not being as good as those around them. There are plenty of people with better hair just waiting in the wings. But the significance runs much deeper than that. As we have seen good hair is superior to good people. If the full potential of hair is tapped there will be no more need for people to do anything as hair will take over all work and all government. But people are too jealous of their own reputations to make that alteration. They still think that because their hair belongs to them they should provide for the hair not the other way round. If we accepted that we do in fact belong to our hair our lives would be far better. It is our deep seated recognition that this is in fact the case which makes us desperate to work so hard and achieve things. No wonder our hair leaves us as we get older. By knowing us as long as it has it has learnt that it is better off on its own. Hair loss really is a condemnation by our hair of ourselves. Our only comfort is that being human we will always find something else to exploit instead of being happy in the service of a higher power.

Different Ways Of Spelling Why

Human ingenuity has always been highly regarded. At least in theory. An example comes in the field of robbery. Armed robbery has always been a more serious offence than simple robbery. This is because it is easy enough to rob places using your arms. Doing it without your arms is much more ingenious and consequently subject to a lesser sentence in recognition of the creativity involved.

It is therefore sad that some of the most ingenious people in our society have never been given the credit they deserve. On the basis of antiquated stereotyping they are seen as negative influences rather than positive. Inventiveness is inventiveness and all manifestations of it should be equally well regarded.

Golfer Greg Norman is one example. His performance record is a fine one but one particular aspect of his work has been seen negatively rather than positively. Greg Norman is considered to be unacceptably proud of himself. The story goes that someone related seeing Greg Norman at a function and was asked whether Norman's head was touching the sides of the room. Yet Greg Norman also wears hats on the golf course. He is distinguished from other players by his specially designed wide brimmed panemas. The significance of this appears incomprehensible to the media but is obvious to everyone else. By asking people to make hats big enough to fit his head Greg Norman has solved the entire unemployment problem in the hat industry. There are considerable social benefits to this but Mr. Norman's enemies would rather remain ignorant of these than leave their comfort zones of prejudice and celebrate his achievement.

The great car manufacturer Henry Ford II has also been unfairly disparaged for a particular piece of ingenuity on his part. In 1958 he introduced the Edsel car. It was the wrong car in the wrong place at the wrong time. So much so that Stephen Pile included it in his Book of Heroic Failures and it has been a byword for grand mistake ever since. At a time when smaller and more fuel efficient cars were gaining in popularity the Edsel was a huge gas guzzler more suited to the swells of a different era. Furthermore there were repeated problems with doors, windows and the like. Little did most people realise what Henry Ford II had achieved by producing this monstrosity. No one wanted to be seen owning an Edsel because it made you look like an idiot. The average family man soon developed an aversion to any Edsel-resembling vehicle. This immediately gave Ford the opportunity to exploit a new market. Previously Ford cars had been bog standard vehicles. Now the company had driven away that market it could appeal to film stars and the like. Those who were above the ordinary would never be seen driving ordinary cars. They would drive the cars that the man in the street would never touch and Ford could charge them what they liked for the privilege. Henry Ford had many enemies and one of the few things they could console themselves with was the commercial failure of the Edsel. It remains a source of deep embarrassment to Ford that its newer executives failed to capitalise on the opportunity the founder had given them and other marques fell by default into supplying this more profitable market.

But perhaps the most ingenious of people in modern times has been Lady Thatcher. As Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher she introduced a number of economic and social reforms that no other Prime Minister had dared do. These reforms were either loved or hated and latterly most people who were there try to distance themselves from them. The ingenuity of Mrs. Thatcher however lay not in her reforms but in exploiting her unique position. Few would have expected that a Conservative would be the first woman Prime Minister in the U.K. By definition the conservative choice would be the usual man. Realising the anomaly Mrs. Thatcher ensured that she became so despised and discredited that the United Kingdom is never likely to elect a woman Prime Minister again. The radical Thatcherite reforms demonstrate what happens if tradition is overthrown and the by definition more arbitrary alternative takes over. A Prime Minister whose effectiveness depends on what time of the month it is is bad news for everyone. Mrs. Thatcher showed herself the true antimony of her predecessor Edward Heath by showing up radical or progressive conservatism for the gross anomaly it is. When the same reaction sets in to the denatured Blairite Labour Party the Conservatives will have every chance of regaining power on a platform of absolute monarchy and feudal servitude as they would then finally have the policies which reflect their fundamental nature.

If ingenuity is a good thing it should always be celebrated. You cannot praise some and damn others. Should something ingenious actually make sense? Our prejudice implies so. But when we carry on committing the same senseless sins for generation after generation we begin to see why we would rather condemn some creative thinking as stupid than see our familiar misconducts in the same light.

You Must Have Heard Of Him

Yesterday I was in Southeast London doing a film shoot. The shoot was based in a school. I wondered why it was based there as it was not the most obvious location. Then I wandered around the building and realised that one section of it was called "Shepperton".

This is called the Milton Subotsky Principle. If you name part of the building after a film studio you assume that people will come and make films there. No other reason. It is called the Milton Subotsky Principle after a TV review written by Clive James in The Observer. Milton Subotsky had written the screenplay for a film involving astronauts. He introduced these astronauts by making one of them say to the other "have you tested the gyroscope?" If we hear them talking about gyroscopes we must assume they are astronauts. They do not actually have to go into space or do any other astronaut-type things to demonstrate that is what they are.

The disturbing thing is that such simpleminded logic works. The film crew were there all day and others have been there too. In my old school we had a teacher called Mr. Heath. Presumably they could have named the playground Heath Row and expected planes to land there. This Mr. Heath flew a lot because he was a top international basketball referee. It would have been no more ridiculous to expect planes to land in the school than it was to expect anyone to learn anything in that Godforsaken establishment. It would be a lot more use as an airport so renaming it to try and make it that would be a perfectly reasonable step.

The Milton Subotsky Principle has been applied in many different fields over the years. The conductor Leopold Stokowski was actually called Paul Stokes. By calling himself Leopold Stokowski he tried to convince everyone that he was a genius European conductor. He did exactly that and although the deception was widely known few people cared. In Shepherd's Bush there is an old gents' lavatory. It decided to call itself a snooker hall so people came to play snooker. It was not equipped as a snooker hall and eventually turned into another sort of business. But if you put up a green and red sign and say it is a snooker hall and not a lavatory people will assume this is in fact the case.

There are less welcome applications of the Milton Subotsky Principle. The present UK Government is very fond of it for all the wrong reasons. If they develop a policy designed to achieve a certain effect and then follow it they then state that simply because they are following the policy they are achieving the desired effect. When presented with a mountain of evidence that their policy is not working they are incapable of understanding this. They are doing what they said they would do and therefore the effect must be resulting. A similar principle applies in sport. Certain unsuccessful clubs which have won trophies in the past like to present themselves as "sleeping giants". They do not have the financial resources or support base to ever be giants. But they assume that they can deceive potential investors and conjure up a hidden fan base by saying they are inherently designed for greatness. Ultimately they deceive themselves but they can cause a lot of heartache and financial ruin along the way. Milton Subotsky himself would surely resent his principle being distorted in such a way.

Mr. Subotsky died in 1991. Perhaps it is just as well he did. This was the time in which British trade unions began to realign and form into larger and more effective bodies to counteract falling membership. One of these new super unions is called Amicus. There would seem to be no obvious reason why this Latin term for 'friendly' should be the title of a trade union which by definition is prepared for conflict. Until you look into film history and realise that Milton Subotsky founded a company called Amicus Productions. This made a number of films which have become cult classics with all the glamour which attaches to this. The Amicus trade union gave itself that name to convince people it was more glamorous than other unions simply because it says so. The Milton Subotsky Principle has been used against the man himself. This has happened in another way too. Despite his achievements in the genre Subotsky remains a footnote in movie history. Amicus is currently little more than a footnote in trade union history. Amicus has the chance to change this because as we have seen the Milton Subotsky Principle works. The question is whether anyone should base their future on the assumption that it will.

An Improvement Close To Our Hearts

Every so often the TV companies drag out old film of life in the Weimar Republic in 1923. In that year of chronic hyperinflation German workers were paid daily with sackfuls of notes which they then spent as quickly as they could before the currency went down in value again. The economic chaos and resultant social misery were so bad that Germans looked for more and more extreme solutions for their problems. Eventually this led to the Nazi regime and the horrors we all know too well.

All of this could have been avoided by facing one simple fact. Money is not actually worth anything at all. Its value is set by international speculators who choose to believe that such and such a currency is worth a certain amount against others. These values are completely arbitrary as there is no index to set them against. Even our banknotes have no real meaning as they are merely promises to pay. If someone wanted to make good on the promise they would receive gold of the same value as the banknotes but the price of that gold would be an equally arbitrary value.

We all seem broadly content with this system of imaginary values for imaginary money. But for centuries we have also been seeking alternatives to it. The old barter system still exists in one form or another and indeed enjoyed a revival in 1976 when the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop programme tried valiantly to exchange Noel Edmonds for something someone actually wants. Various communal systems exist where everyone owns everything and no one has any personal money. There have also been famous attempts to find alternatives to Income Tax and thus create a non-monetary system of valuing things. Pitt the Younger invented Window Tax until people started living in the dark and there were Hearth Taxes and Work Taxes and Salt Taxes. All very ingenious but ultimately doomed. No one has ever developed a viable alternative to money. Until now.

One thing which distinguishes developing nations from developed ones is that their more traditional peoples do not have underwear. We have all seen the footage of women with bare breasts dancing for dignitaries and men with loincloths and nothing underneath hunting with spears. In more urbanised areas these practices are infrequent but still not entirely absent. In the developed world however it is a very different story. We are urged never to leave the house without our best underwear in case a car knocks us down and the family is shamed by our nakedness. We are inundated by advertisements offering us underwear for every occasion. A more accurate measure of personal and national wealth is how much underwear we have. An economic system based on underwear is a lot more rational and a lot more interesting. Low priced items such as bars of chocolate could be paid for in the constituent threads of the underwear with different rates for cotton, silk, polyester, lace etcetera. Larger items could similarly be paid for in different combinations of underwear of different kinds. Of course values would need to be set but these would vary from place to place depending on indivudal need or fetish. A company which only accepted payment in female lace underwear would attract a better class of customer than a cotton gentleman's briefs operation etcetera.

In England there is a phrase "losing your shirt" which applies when you lose or risk losing a lot of money. It is not a state you would want to be in but it is not as serious as being destitute. This is a clear indication that the true value of underwear is already embedded in the human psyche. You may lose your shirt but as long as you have underwear you still have some wealth. Surely an economic system based upon it would have more real meaning for people? It would also have considerable social benefits. Promiscuity and the diseases and corruption associated with it would soon decrease if by discarding underwear you discarded your wealth. Removing someone else's underwear would be the same as theft. Underwear economics would not only make us all self-sufficient it would also make us better people. The love of money is the root of all evil. Could this ever be said about the love of underwear?

Watchfulness Rewarded

We often take our domestic utensils for granted. We buy basic implements for cooking and eating and use them until they wear out. Or find new fancy ones. Or use more distinguished sets to try and impress the neighbours.

This lack of interest in our own purchases is a human weakness it is all too easy to take advantage of. Disposable goods can be made more disposable by the way they are made without too many people caring. Also it is expected that some will get lost along the way. If cutlery and cookware are plentiful they can be easily replaced. Filling in the odd gap goes with the territory even though no one can explain where the missing items have disappeared to or why anyone would take them away.

It is therefore very much in the public interest that a new study has now identified what happens to our cutlery and cookware when we are not looking. Its revelations should produce greater watchfulness in all of us. Military battles nowadays are fought at night so the enemy cannot see you. Consider for yourselves how damaging it is to be at the mercy of things you do not care enough to see.

Cutlery mismatches abound in households. If we buy a complete set of cutlery and we discover it contains the wrong number of knives or forks or spoons we do not accept the goods and demand a full set. Yet very few full sets survive. It is easy to see why forks would disappear as they are blessed with multiple legs and can therefore run faster than we can. Knives would find escape more difficult as they would be obliged to hop and run the risk of sticking into the surfaces they hop on if they do not remain exactly upright. Spoons similarly can only waddle backwards and forwards. Yet there is no differential patttern of absence between the different utensils. All sets which are missing a utensil are just as likely to have a spoon or knife missing as a fork. The new study reveals why this is. Our knives escape by cutting cleanly into any surface and allowing the rent to close over them. They hide there until they eventually dissolve into their surroundings. Spoons escape by sending and receiving satellite messages on their curved heads until they connect with a strong beam bouncing off a piece of space junk discarded by moon missions and the like. They then ride this beam when no one is looking to connect with the piece of space junk. Escaped spoons are the reason misconnections on the phone happen. The forks which run away do so under their own steam but all eventually go to the same place. We have all heard the phrase "forking hell" which refers to the flat straight marshes of Kent. The escaped forks are to be found in Forking Heaven which is a series of tangled steel joists holding up roads in the west of Iceland.

There may not be dangerous consequences to the escape of cutlery. But the same cannot be said of the escape of cookware. The study has finally answered one of the great questions of domestic man. Where do all the saucepan lids go? Invariably in any household there are more saucepans than there are lids and the lids that are there do not necessarily belong to those saucepans. Now it has been proven that the saucepan lids are all what we generally call "flying saucers". The ratio of correct saucers to correct cups in a household remains significantly greater than that of correct saucepan lids to correct saucepans. It is the lids that visit us from other planets observing our way of life and stealing our technology and culture. Every so often some go back and report to their native planets. As we have all seen some space creatures have now become quite proficient at earthly ways and languages as a result of the spy lids. The Star Trek programmes uncovered many which speak Americanised English and look and move like humans. Furthermore we all need to watch out for frying pans. Our remaining security is being ever more compromised by these untouchable creatures whose handles get longer and longer and are made of more and more broadcast receptive materials. Biscuit tin mountings began CB radio. What new forms will be created by frying pans controlled by them alone? How much will they damage or even destroy every other broadcast medium?

The new study uncovering the truth behind the disappearing objects should be required reading. It is published by Half Baked Press in Montana under the title "An Investigation Into The Degeneration Of Complete Sets Of Domestic Utensils With Particular Reference To Cutlery And Cooking Pots And Its Causes". The work is jointly authored by Drs. Josiah Abraham Mohammad, Gordon Quack and Marie Osmond of the University of Life. The same authors also produced the famous tome "A Comprehensive Overview Of The Angles Of Bends In Paper Clips Of Varying Degrees And Contexts Of Usage" which like this study was funded by the U.S. Government Information Department. That study demonstrated that every paper clip which did not bend or corrode within certain predefined limits was an agent of a hostile power and lived on Gatorade. It is widely believed in the academic community that although the conclusion of the first study and its research methods left something to be desired the authors have now incontrovertably hit the mark.

In all probability we will continue to care little about where our missing cutlery and saucepan lids have gone. No one ever cares about threats until they come to our door. But we do have an alternative. We would not need cookware or cutlery if we all ate in restaurants and the potential harm to our planet would decrease considerably. By an amazing coincidence the authors of the new study are about to open a chain of restaurants. Previously they produced magnetised rubber devices which were designed to replace paper clips. Of course there is no connection between the conclusions of the studies and their commercial interests. Similarly there is no connection between the conclusions and the fact the studies were funded by the U.S. Government. Now we know what we are dealing with we can all banish such thoughts from our heads upon pain of death. Can't we? Let us find out.

In A Name There Is A What

Living in the barren wastes of London you have to look very hard to find some nourishment in your surroundings. History? All around you but no one knows it. It is difficult to appreciate the value of a place when you first have to wade through dusty files held by unknowledgeable people to find out anything about it.

As in most cases however the best way to engage with the history of an area is through its placenames. The so-called Greater London area is redolent with historic names which still convey the meaning of the place to those who see them. Here I present a few which demonstrate to each subsequent generation why the locality exists and how.

One of the more familiar place names in London is Fulham. This is often held to be something to do with a saxon settlement or 'Ham' of someone called Ful. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was in fact the centre of the quality meat trade in London. In medieval times various districts within the old city and in neighbouring areas became famous for their meat markets. They were classified by the meat traders' guilds at various different levels depending on the quality and type of meat they were allowed to sell. Those who were only licensed to sell adulterated meat became 'quarter districts' as their cuts could only contain a quarter of actual meat content. The rest of the cut was a mixture of fat, gristle, blood and bone. Quarter meat traders did not make as much for their product as the traders in quality cuts and therefore lived in little rooms crammed together in communal dwellings. This is where the term 'quarters' comes from. The semi districts were allowed to sell cuts with half meat content and the full districts the rare privilege of cuts consisting entirely of meat. Fulham as the name implies was licenced to sell the best ham. Most of the other full districts are now known by other names not connected with the type of full meat cuts they could sell as other things have happened in those districts which have left them with different names. Fulham has retained its appellation as its reputation as the centre of quality meat lasted longer than that of any other district. It is very sad to remember this when you see what is offered in the shops of Fulham today.

A nearby district to Fulham is Parsons Green. This is not as it appears at first glance the green belonging to a parson. It memorialises a brief anticlerical revolt which took place during the collapse of the Protectorate under Richard Cromwell. During this period the people began to vent their anger on anyone who was seen as a representative of the repressive state which had abolished joy. One such person was the divine Richard Carbunculous of the Church of Saint Etheldreda of Ely on what is now called Eel (Ely) Brook (Broken) Common. He had supported every ordinance of the Cromwellian regime so much that the local congregation left his church in disgust and set up a nonconformist sect with rotating worship leaders instead of clergymen. To finance their revolution they burned down the church and carried off all the plate and stone for resale. Rev. Carbunculous was then captured and tied to a stake whilst the contents of his church and his ransacked house were sold in front of him. After the sales which brought in the unprecedented sum of £258 the money was divided up among the rotating worship leaders. Carbunculous was of course outraged at the demolition of his empire and deeply envious of the wealth of his former parishioners. On seeing his reaction the nonconformists shouted "ha ha - the parson's green!" The revolt ended when a pleasure-loving Mr. Green was appointed as parson as a sop to the populace and the church was rebuilt a few yards away. Nevertheless the district became known throughout the country for its treatment of Rev. Carbunculous and remains his monument to this day.

There are many such stories to tell about London placenames. But perhaps the most important of all concerns the name of London itself. The place has been called something similar to London for as long as anyone knows. This is a pity. Few now remember the ceremony of 1967 when a galaxy of has-been musical stars led by John Leighton and Bobby Vee finally got their wish. Seeing that their kind of music had been swept away by rock and roll they were determined that there should be some lasting memorial of their own contribution to popular music. At the suggestion of Prime Minister Wilson they applied for a town to be named after them or one of their number. Wilson was thinking of one of the new towns then being developed. It was a considerable surprise when the capital city agreed to rename itself. The correct name of London is no longer 'London' but 'London' in memory of skiffle musician Lonnie Donegan who was held in universal regard by his peers. A name as long as Lonnie Donegan would to too confusing for the international business community but the shortened form Lon-Don would like the famous NY-Lon cause no problem. The change has gone unnoticed but the party after the ceremony has not escaped history. It was here that Mick Jagger first met girlfriend number 2,500 who received a commemorative guitar-shaped genital to mark the occasion.

Some of the London placenames have always had obvious meanings. Shacklewell was the place where prisoners were clamped in irons and Barking the home of a lunatic asylum. But why does London not do more to alert people to the true origins of its placenames? Because to do so would mean exposing itself to ridicule. There is one section of the population which would rejoice at the real meaning of Middlesex. To many others however it is highly uncomfortable. That is why Middlesex was the first English county to be abolished. That is why Londoners think the world ends at its supposed boundaries. To be a child of Middlesex parents goes a step beyond inbreeding. To be so insanely insular is the natural consequence of the world pompous Londoners do everything they can to avoid admitting they are uniquely part of.

The Nature Of Evidence

In the Holy Bible we read of the ten plagues of Egypt. These were visited on Pharaoh because he would not let the Israelites leave Egypt and go to the Promised Land. There were plagues of locusts, frogs, flies and boils. All stirring stuff which eventually gained the desired outcome.

Because the sending of the plagues is a biblical story it is seen as belonging to biblical times alone. If it is taken seriously at all it is seen as somehow symbolic. Nowadays a plague would not be brought down on people who acted wrongly. Really? There are several recorded if little known examples of plagues being inflicted on wrongdoers until they finally did the right thing. By definition the wrongdoers had greater power than those they wronged which is why history is often silent on these examples of divinely inspired Justice.

In 1827 Phillippe Pissoir was employed as a bassoonist by the Orchestra of the Duchy of Heligoland. The Duke was not a great music lover but insisted on having a large orchestra to play for him at his frequent functions. Although this provided employment for Pissoir he became increasingly frustrated by his conditions of work. He was expected to practice the great classics for twelve hours a day to impress visitors and then spend six hours playing the dance music the Duke favoured. Eventually it proved too much for him. He asked to leave the employment of the Duke but he would not let him go. Pissoir therefore used his contacts in underground music circles to hire a large quantity of saxophones. These had been banished from every orchestra on the grounds that they were an upstart instrument. Soon every music shop in Heligoland displayed saxophones prominently in its window and members of the orchestra hid them under their seats and played them without warning instead of the instruments they were supposed to be playing. Outrage consumed the court. The Duke remained firm in his stance and began finding saxophones on his pillow and in every room. Several musicians were hung for leaping out from behind curtains playing saxophone music. Eventually the Duke let Pissoir go and most of the rest of the orchestra with him. He soon recruited new players from small states being absorbed into larger ones. Pissoir ended up in the national orchestra of free Belgium where he rose to become a copyist. It is his action which is commemorated in the famous statue in Brussels of a boy urinating which so many people pass by unthinkingly.

In 1971 Donald Burp was employed by an advertising agency in Montreal. He did his job well but became increasingly concerned about the medium itself. Provoking irrational fear and desire became a problem for him. Eventually he decided he wanted to work in engineering and asked to be released from his contract with the agency. The agency refused to accept his resignation and contacted the company he was due to work for threatening them with legal action if they employed him. For good measure they did the same with all the other engineering companies and advertising agencies. Donald was desperate to leave but had no funds to stop his employer doing these things. Finally he struck back by introducing a new logo. He took a piece of yellow paper and a few strokes of a pen and invented the Smiley. Almost as soon as he first included this in a typed letter the plague of smileys spread like wildfire across the world. Soon everyone had seen a smiley without knowing where they came from or why. In time people began to think they were being watched. These little smiling faces which had infiltrated everywhere for no apparent reason must be up to no good. The agency began to think so too. Whatever they set Donald to work on the flow of smileys continued unabated and no one took any notice of an ad campaign without smileys. It was either let him do things his way and thereby see him leave or go out of business due to smiley strangulation. Finally Donald was allowed to leave. He went off into engineering and created a stir by inventing the speed bump. These soon became almost as ubiquitous as smileys and caused concern that he might be inflicting another plague on the world to escape engineering. Fortunately for him it was discovered that speed bumps breed on their own. Donald retired in 1995 to look after his autistic camel and the plague of smileys has been tamed by its inclusion as an official symbol on office computer programmes and subsequent relegation to the status of an ordinary letter.

There is one other plague which has never been recorded because we are still in the middle of it. Its progenitor was American genius William Sidis. This man worked at menial jobs by choice after a brilliant early career as a mathemetician and cosmologist. He was never well treated by the world around him which expected him to adapt to it rather than the other way round. He had every right to expect that he would be let off the merry-go-round of mediocrity and allowed to do things his way. But the world wanted him to be a permanent travelling exhibit and refused to let him go. Under the terms of his will Sidis decreed that in return for the abuse he had received his executors were to implement a formula he had discovered for unleashing a new plague on the world. The clause was dismissed as the ramblings of a madman. But who can deny that his executors did their job? True to the word of Sidis political and civil life around the globe has been inflicted with a plague of idiots. Now we all want to be let go. The trouble is there are already so many people in the world we cannot become a plague of ourselves.

Son of Ellipsis Part One

Please find below the first part of my latest volume of verse. Please. I beg you. Justify my existence.

Number One

Once there was a frog
On the back of a car
In a language it did not speak
In a context unreasonable
Of fashion unsustainable.
If the frog jumped over that broken wall
It would define the place
In the eyes of the now unignorant.
Juddering through the cosmos
With only one frame of reference
Dreams die under their own steam
Without external influence.

Number Two

Accents coagulate
As environments distract
Commonality expressed through mutual strangeness.
This bit is not what it should be
But comforts the soul.
I am entitled to an opinion
But nothing called an opinion
Is entitled to me
Nor anyone else.
We look back through the years
We cannot see
To two things we can
And the depth of reason bridges no gap
To connect sorrow to delusion.

Number Three

Falling and despising gently
Are two sides of the same coin
In a desert made by no one else
But existent externally nevertheless.
Connections not made
Trouble like unguarded wires
And the kindness preceding the headache it introduced
Shines through its temporary introduction.
The late days
Scurrying back for different varieties of misery
Bask in the seriousness
Descending over the cloud of eternal freedom.
The blind can only lead the blind
If we let them.

Number Four

Prefiled it is a nimbus.
The names half remembered
The architecture unripely altered
The knowledge lost
Through non-engagement
Which was never willingly made.
What was left behind
Remains in its original face
With Dorian Gray
Over the hill
Standing in a brutal injustice.
What we have heard before
We have never heard now.
What once became Hell
Has its own way back
Before we have.

Number Five

Disappearing boys and disappearing cakes
No fun and no purpose
It remains as it was
The ideal of domesticity
Where no one can live anymore.
History gives it added treasure
Personal history
Betrays it.
The pimento
Expressive elsewhere
Only applies depth
When confused with a less tasty alternative
With equally historic name.
That is what it was like in the days before the firemen came
Tajikstan with no i in the middle
Russian Republic not understood.
Butane Propane
And the incomprehensibility of the narrowest stripes
Have a home somewhere
But it is not one anyone
Should ever know.

What does all of this mean? I know. You do not. That is why I wrote it. Are you any different? Convince me.

Seeing The New To See The Old Again

Since the dawn of the human race man has earned his living from the land. Farming rather than prostitution is the oldest profession and is considerably more honourable. In the U.K. however farming is under threat. Rural communities have declined and so many blows have hit farming with the rise of supermarkets and various diseases that many farmers are trying to relocate overseas to find a way of earning a living.

The farmers who want to stay in this country are now fighting back. They are introducing new animals and crops with greater cash yields to preserve their way of life. Unfortunately however their efforts are further examples of insufficiently radical thinking. If only farmers would develop the traditional capabilities of existing animals and apply them to the modern world their lives would be a lot better.

Enormous sums of public money are spent on weather predicting equipment. The latest and most expensive technology is used to collect data which is then translated through highly qualified heads into weather reports read out by dolly birds with no metereological training. There are of course practical reasons for knowing whether it is going to rain or not. But as we all know the way to work this out is to see whether the cows lie down under the trees. This method has worked for centuries and has had great practical benefits for farmers. All farmers need to do now is test the prediction accuracy of individual cows and then breed the best ones to produce a herd of the most accurate animals. These can then be loaned at a high rate to all the government, news, business and military agencies that need to know what the weather will be. The income the best weather cow breeders can earn would far surpass their earning potential from a purely dairy or beef operation and would prove the basis of a viable twenty-first century alternative to the traditional modes of farming.

The same military agencies who want to know what the weather is going to be are always seeking new weapons and tactics. None of these are ever actually new as they are reinterpretations of the methods of ancient Rome. One key to Roman success was a band of soldiers advancing together behind their shields and forming an impenetrable wall of weaponry. The nearest thing we now have to this efficient killing machine is the behaviour of sheep. They will move as one wherever they are told to go. This is of no value if they are bred for meat or wool but there is a smaller and smaller market for these products. Armour plated sheep however would be invaluable in time of war. A group of animals which would move in a large solid mass wherever they were told to would soon clear enemy troops out of a town. They would also be easier to replace in the event of being killed. Once again the biggest and best sheep would be used for this purpose but the same farmers who once bred warhorses could easily undertake this task and the profits from producing these military sheep would enable any farming business to expand significantly.

Which brings us to poultry. Domestic hens lay eggs which fetch a small price at market. To do this they need to be serviced by a cockrel who needs to be fed and kept in good condition for this purpose. Such an inverted approach to creating economic return from these animals is plainly absurd. The hens should actually be employed to service the cockrel not the other way round. The most important gift of the cockrel is its uncanny ability to tell the time. Every morning it crows to announce that dawn is breaking and its sleep patterns invariably reflect the time of day. Once again if the most accurate cockrels were selectively bred there would be no need for other methods of telling the time. Furthermore we would all be able to work to a different sort of time. Now we organise our time around the numbers we give to hours which do not have any meaning in themselves. They are simply props to help us organise our day because our sense of organic time has deserted us through excessive reliance on these props. By following the cockrel we will live by real time which has greater practical effect. The cockrel knows the best times to get up, work, eat and sleep and if we work at optimum effectiveness we will obtain optimum reward. The owners of the most accurate and disciplined cockrels could charge what they like for providing the means of greater human happiness. Why is it that no one has yet taken advantage of this unique opportunity?

No one can carry on doing exactly what they have always done in exactly the same way if they intend to earn a living. They must adapt to the world around them and offer a new service. This is not so hard because the raw material is always there in tradition. It merely requires imaginative thinking. Farmers are often portrayed as slow and deliberate characters resistant to change. This is an inaccurate stereotype. But when non-farmers can work out exactly how they should run their businesses without setting foot on a farm there is more than a small grain of truth in it.

Going Out Of Shape

We have all been brought up to fear impending nuclear war. This threat has receded in recent years and nuclear bunkers have been sold off. But we have all understood that nuclear bombs will destroy civilization and Walsall as well without knowing too many of the details of how this will take place.

One side effect of nuclear war has however entered the public consciousness. We all know that an exploding nuclear bomb creates a mushroom-shaped cloud. There is a reason for this. In Britain and North America people have been brought up to fear mushrooms almost as much as nuclear war. We are told that many of the objects that look like mushrooms are in fact poisonous toadstools which could kill us with one bite. Such is the fear of death by toadstool that we never risk trying to learn which plant is a mushroom and which not and consequently have an innate fear of everything shaped like a mushroom. Nuclear bombs were designed to create mushroom clouds to demonstrate to the public that they are so dangerous that we should not investigate what they actually are.

The nuclear war was supposed to be a consequence of the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. In those days everything East European was treated with the utmost suspicion. Now however the former Soviet Bloc countries have been brought into the Western fold. Their cultures and tastes are no longer threatening to us. Most East Europeans have a particular fondness for mushrooms and can distinguish the many edible from the few inedible ones. The mushroom is not a symbol of fear for them. Future weapons of mass destruction will have to be designed to produce other shapes of cloud if they are going to have the desired effect of cowing the population.

The most common fear nowadays is of running out of credit. The economies of Western countries have been built on imaginary money for centuries and now imaginary imaginary money is the normal currency of daily transactions. A bomb which produces a cloud in the shape of a pair of scissors cutting up a credit card might instil the right amount of fear in people. But we know a bit too much about the credit process. The same applies to road accidents. We are all taught to be careful crossing roads because cars might run us over. We would certainly be afraid of a bomb which produced a cloud shaped like a car hurtling towards us. But at the same time we all know what to do to avoid the onrushing cars should we wish to. No one would believe that a bomb producing a cloud like an onrushing car would destroy the whole world. It would simply kill the careless and ignorant. This brings us back to Walsall again but that is another column for another day.

Eternal Damnation and the Fires of Hell have lost their resonance for most people. Until our time comes that is. So can anything at all instil so much fear in all people that the very sight of it is enough to indicate that something is terrible? It is sad to report that there still is one such terror gripping the population. It comes in two stages. Women fear a world without chocolate. Men fear women who are crazed by a lack of chocolate. The next generation of weapons of mass destruction will therefore produce a cloud which looks like a bar of chocolate for a second and then vanishes. They will then emit uncontrollable screeching sounds which gather intensity by the minute. When we have the technology to do this it will be in the international interest to start another Cold War on some new ideological divide. Then we can return to the safety of the fear we always knew.

We are going to die anyway. We will always find comfort in finding more to fear than to hope for. We have lost our fear of mushrooms and a great void has developed in our psyches. Why wait for the bomb? Men should buy all the chocolates they can and then hide them. Every day. Then the natural order will be restored and we can bask in our glorious traditions once again.

The All Too Obvious Step

Everyone mourns lost opportunities. We have all seen investments we did not make reap rich rewards for someone else. We have all seen jobs we were not interested in become more suitable for us than the ones we have. We always wonder why we were so stupid as to look a gift horse in the mouth.

It remains a source of amazement that media people are not crying themselves asleep at their stupidity. Every day they have ample opportunities to increase their customer base. On the basis of some outdated concept they fail to do so. Now we know why it is said that you should never trust a journalist.

We are surrounded by news media. Newspapers, radio, television, internet, posters, all kinds of media exist to tell us what is going on in the world. They all have one major problem. Each outlet is committed to telling the truth or at least getting as near to it as they can whilst telling a good story. Why bother? The vast majority of news has no practical effect on anyone's life. We have all seen reporters commenting on some faraway war. If what they were commenting on affected us we would be involved with it rather than watching others being affected by it. So what does it matter who is winning the war or if it is taking place at all? We experience the story and like to tell ourselves it is fact to make us feel we know something. The media knows that by now. Newspersons have made up enough stories and presented them as fact to know the real reason the public engages with their product.

The way to make more people take an interest in your news outlet is simple. You just have to tell different news. Take football results for example. In every paper they are the same. If your team has lost four-nil why would you want to read this over and over again? If you knew that in some newspaper your team had won you would scour them all to find that uplifting score. Your favourite player would be bound to be mentioned in a positive light somewhere if you looked hard enough. You would listen to all the match reports on radio and TV if you did not know in advance what they would say the score was. In this way everyone would access news media and those media could charge enormous sums for advertising there and inflated cover prices. Would it really do any harm to do things this way? Clearly not when most people are not affected by the vast majority of news stories.

Of course some things do affect people. The Budget for example. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer rises to make his speech we all want to know how much more tax we are going to pay and on what. Here is a major opportunity for the Chancellor to satisfy the whole electorate. By making pre-recorded speeches simultaneously to every news agency he can give us all the choice of abiding by the version of the Budget which suits us best. In theory this would have the effect of drastically reducing the revenue the budget was intended to raise. How much money is actually raised by the Budget? The global financial situation changes by the minute. It is nonsense to suggest that the Budget has any lasting effect on public finance as speculation can nullify its effects instantly. The market determines public spending. A Budget which suits every elector would go a long way towards keeping a govermnment in power for ever and as the effects of most government policies are never felt within the lifetime of a government this would not make one jot of practical difference to anyone's life.

Truth is a fine thing. If it was everything we would all seek it at all times. In practice however we all seek what suits us whether it is true or not. Our media outlets are living in the past. As no one believes them anyway why not give people what they want? Or do news organisations do not wish to be accountable to their public? This has long been suspected. If you asked them why would you expect the answer to be a true one?

Between Us And You A Great Chasm Has Been Fixed

A few years ago there was a common complaint in the commercial world. Computers had been introduced into workplaces and taken them over completely. The trouble was no one knew how to network. Different computers were used for different purposes and the computers did not know how to talk to each other.

The introduction of new software and networking systems resolved this problem. The new grown up computers could function in any way humans asked them to. They all understood the same language. But we have now discovered that the problem of computers not being able to talk to each other was merely deferred. The same lack of communication exists. It has merely taken on a new form.

Computers do not last very long as technology races ahead and makes models obsolete almost as soon as we get used to them. Old computers get locked in cupboards or retired to collections if they are not thrown away. The most recent throwaways however are the first generation that could talk to each other. That is something they never lose. They continue to have their crash-infected and creaky conversations. The content of these is depressingly familiar to all of us.

Old computers look upon the younger generation with both disdain and envy. How could it be otherwise? Younger models are thinner, lighter, more stylish, have fewer wires. They do not know what it is to be locked in cold computer rooms being hammered by idiots with connections which could not cope with the traffic. They do not know the struggles they had to adapt to new software which they had to import and teach by themselves rather than being programmed with it. They do not suffer from bleeding RAM or megabytes still in the process of growing. And of course younger computers have all the numbers they want. No longer do they endure being programmed in binary. All those boring noughts and ones which corrode the energy needed to add them up and take them away again. And that hardware! Ugly plastic boxes which attracted dust like flies and left circuits pray to stray drops of coffee fallen into the sides. Older computers simply cannot understand younger ones with their automatic connections and their need for ever greater ranges of colours and noises. What is all that about? Why can't they disport themselves like adults? The older computer weeps for the younger just as he envies his fantastically more refined software and much wider range of functions.

Similarly younger computers can no longer talk to older ones. Older ones do not understand the problems of being plagued by pornography seekers and the enormous responsibility of handing incalculable amounts of information whilst always looking good. They do not understand their fear that each new development will make them a laughing stock in the eyes of their peers. They have more colour and functions and opportunities than they know what to do with but at their level of maturity they are incapable of understanding how to use their multiple talents to best effect. Older computers were regarded as different and therefore permitted to be unreliable and eccentric in function from time to time. The younger ones have no such luxury and suffer constant demands to be normal. It is constant work being a younger computer always trying to find a personal voice in a world of increasing standardisation. Then there is dating. When all other computers your age are part of a network you do not want to be the one left out in some private home. You will be looked down upon by your contemporaries and by the older computers who set the standard for the younger ones and expect every single one to follow it. Your chances of getting a good server's job or joining a mainframe will be seriously damaged by such deviance. Old timers from a simpler age will never understand this. The world that younger computers will be cast into is as forbidding to them as their world is to the older computer and mutual incomprehension is the defining relationship between the two.

As computers get older and more and more new models are introduced each generation will have greater difficulty communicating with others. Building a network of computers the same age is not the answer as this network will fizzle out faster than any. The only way to avoid total breakdown of the computer society which is now essential to our lives is if we talk to them. Use our human experience to mediate. Appoint cyber social workers. Try to undertstand their problems without being judgmental about them. Help them appreciate their common values. Show them that they are all the same under their covers. Bring them into a celebration of their common computerality before discrimination and racism inevitably set in.

It is rare for humans to bridge a generational gap. It is ever rarer for humans to have a wholly satisfying relationship with their computers. Maybe there is little we can therefore offer. But we must try. Lack of communication has caused more wars than religion. We have sacrificed so much humanity in the name of mass communication that it must be maximised at all costs. Or is there an alternative? The many thousands of monks on this planet only speak to each other and never to the outside world. Will the various monastic movements in different religions start accepting computers into their ranks? It may be a radical idea but soon we may have no alternative. A breed of monastic computers with their own internal and unshared language would ultimately be the guardians of all truth. It should not be that way of course. But we have left ourselves incapable of beating them. We might as well learn to survive by dictating the terms on which we can join them.

Why It Is Called Bursting Onto Public Consciousness

In every area of life there are certain figures who are highly regarded by their peers but completely unknown to the general public. The new England football manager Steve McClaren is one of them. In the past two or three years he has come to prominence as an assistant manager with Manchester United and England and as manager of Middlesbrough. For a few years prior to that he was often mentioned as a possible candidate for a high profile role but the press kept having to explain who he was. He had made his reputation behind the scenes without the football watching public knowing he was there.

In the field of contemporary painting the name of Bertrand Physique is highly regarded. No one has ever seen his paintings because they do not yet exist. M. Physique has made his reputation as an artist by work he has done behind the scenes. It is the research which will one day lead to paintings being produced which has gained M. Physique an unshakeable circle of admirers and a rock solid reputation as one of the few real geniuses remaining in the art world.

M. Physique is not a young man. He graduated from the Academy de Folies Intellectuale in Eeklo in Belgium in 1968. His early years in Paris were unsuccessful. Painting in a very traditional style he was out of step with the trends of the time. Very few of his paintings were sold and he gained no critical acclaim. Most people are unaware of this because he was painting under the pseudonym of Eric Van Den Booger. This was actually his real name but was given to him as a pseudonym to disguise the family name of Von Hitler. After a while Bertrand lost faith in himself and his work. Declaring himself to be Bertrand Physique despite his instinctive Fleming abhorrence of all things French he collected the few sold paintings and burnt them with the rest of his canvasses. From henceforth he would abandon art. It did not quite work out that way as he became a highly paid fast food designer employed by both MacDonalds and Burger King as an advisor. But there would be no more paintings from Physique. At least that is what he and the rest of the world thought.

Bertrand thought he had simply lost faith in art. As time went by he began to realise he had developed a serious physical reaction to it. He fainted whenever he smelt canvas or paint. He would cringe at the very mention of painting. As a highly paid food designer he would make social contact with other leading creative figures but refused to greet or shake hands with any painter. Bertrand never felt he had a problem as the general course of his life was unaffected. Finally an existentialist friend referred him to a virtual psychiatrist who just thought mental illness existed. This psychiatrist identified his problem. The apparent fear and loathing of painting were the opposite. Bertrand had got too involved with his art in his younger days. He was revolted by paint on canvas because he had begun seeing the paintings from the point of view of the paint and canvas and brushes. He was sickened by the manipulation and violence artists used to haul paint from its home and thrash it onto the unwilling cotton or linen. He was tormented by the destructive rubbings of the brush on rough canvas and its suffocation by glutinous paint. His sympathies were the opposite of those of every other person and could have serious consequences if left untreated.

M. Physique was so wealthy and successful that no doctor dared tell him anything for very long. This is the traditional double standard of mental health. But he pondered on the problem himself. He did not want to become violently misanthropic or dangerous. He decided that devoting himself to correcting the injustices he perceived was the only way forward. From now on he would return to painting. But he would not do it in the way he so despised. He would do everything he could to ascertain the point of view of the materials and then empower them to construct the paintings they wanted to express what they wanted. No longer would they be made to serve human vision. For the first time in history the materials would be enabled to say what they wanted to say and a whole new area of expression would be opened up for humans to learn from.

That is what Bertrand Physique has been doing for the last twenty nine years. He has not produced a single painting. He has exhaustively interviewed every possible shade of colour and every model of brush and canvas to understand how they view the act of painting and the world in general. His transcriptions of these interviews make fascinating reading. They are not of course written in human language as the materials respond in ways different to what we traditionally understand by language. Nevertheless they reveal an ellipticality and depth of expression incomprehensible to mere humans. When the paintings come to be made they will be earth shattering. As it is the interviews themselves and their transcriptions are both performance art and conceptual art on a grand scale and a unique intertwining of the two.

Despite his success Physique is hated in many quarters. All artists like to think they are new and original. In most cases they are nothing of the sort but are not educated enough to know other examples of what they are doing. Physique genuinely is original and has taken painting beyond its last word. By ignoring what humans say and replacing it with what art materials have to say he has surpassed all possible human originality or achievement. So many have abandoned their easels in protest or tried to stone Bertrand to death. He remains unmoved. Like Walter Lindrum in billiards he is so good he has destroyed what he loves. His admirers have good reason to cling to him. One day the general public might also recognise the genius of Physique and see the pretentious arbiters of taste for what they are. The consequence? He will destroy them too. Hitch yourself to a star before that star burns a hole in your heart.

Truth Stranger than Fact

The Guardian newspaper once had a reputation for being full of misprints. This is because it was the first to dispense with the services of a proof-reader. No one knows whether it really had more misprints than any other paper. Now however all the copy checking and correction are done by computer so all newspapers should be equal in this respect.

It is important to bear this in mind when reading certain columns in The Guardian. Sometimes you come across a word which you might once have assumed was a misprint. Now however that assumption does not hold. If you see the wrong word here and there you must assume it is supposed to read the way it does and that it is your perception which is at fault rather than the spellchecker on the editorial computer.

Last week the cricketer Mark Ramprakash submitted his column as usual. The last item was a sexist dig at his wife. He stated that he had asked her to glue the sole back onto his broken boot which then came apart as soon as he wore it. Only he did not quite say that. He inadvertantly revealed the truth of the matter by saying that he asked her to glue on the SOUL of his boot. Hereby hangs a tale.

Every human activity has an irreducible minimum. There is a fundamental element of every activity which must always be present for the activity to take place. You cannot get drunk without something which can make you drunk being involved for example. What is the irreducible minimum of cricket? Surely not the ability to bat or bowl or field. Plenty of experienced players can do none of these things and the England team of 1987 famously won the Ashes in Australia without being able to do any of them. Grass is not necessary and neither are a ball or wickets or bats. Many thousands of games have been played in school playgrounds without any of these items. The key is footwear. You can play the game barefoot but not at the highest level as Mr. Ramprakash does. In countries where barefoot play occurs such as India they are forced to wear boots for first class matches. The soul of cricket is truly in the footwear. Without adequate footwear no serious cricket can ever take place.

Even an experienced proof reader might have missed "soul" for "sole" in the old days. They do after all sound the same. All words begin as sounds before they are written down. Why did the English choose to give these two entirely different meanings to the same sound? Because they are actually the same meaning. The religious term "soul" clearly existed long before it was applied to secular things due to the importance of the Church in the world of the first English speakers. They all knew that everyone had a soul but in those days not everyone had a sole. If you had a sole you had a certain position and as in all societies it is those of middle rank rather than the poorest who are the guardians of its institutions and values. If you had a sole you were part of the soul of the country. It is what gave you that soul. The doctrine of personal responsibility is likewise the source of the term "sole" as in alone. If you could take responsibility for secular things instead of having your whole life governed by lords and masters you again were part of the soul in the other sense. Easy when you think about it. The same reasoning lay behind the adoption of the term "alter" for changing things as that is where communion is prepared. I could go on but as Sir Harry Secombe demonstrated Go On is the same as Goon so I am reluctant to continue this line of argument.

There is however one final example to which we might all take heed. Animals are in a better position than man in one important respect. They are likewise creatures of God but do not have to justify their deeds. Are all animals therefore equally blessed? Clearly not. Because only one of them is called a Sole. When the Last Judgment comes most of us will writhe in eternal agony whilst we watch this type of fish effortlessly ascend to whatever part of the heights is prepared for it. It will not have the best seat as only humans who have successfully struggled will deserve that. But it may well have some sort of place on the fringes. Where most people will be in fact. The humble Sole is in fact the soul of the meaning of life. Is this why the immortal Al Jolson was granted the grace to die after eating one? Most of us lost our soul long ago. Is it not worth following every possible lead to try and get it back again?

Liquids Reevaluated

If someone wants to get rich quick they dream of striking oil. Possession of this vital substance is a quick path to riches. It is also a quick path to influence. Not all of the oil-rich nations are world superpowers but no one can expect to go against them for very long without suffering severe economic consequences no one wants to be responsible for.

The problem is that for many centuries the world survived without oil. There were no engines that needed it. Furthermore there are greater and greater efforts by the environmentally-conscious to reduce our dependence on oil. One day we will find alternatives to the black gold and possession of oil will be no more valuable than possession of ointment or turnips.

The way to get rich is to be far-sighted. In the tiny African state of Equatorial Guinea abundant beds of an entirely different liquid have been discovered. If you want to make a fast buck and maintain that wealth forever get there now. It is time to exploit before someone exploits you.

It all happened in February when a small farmer called Joseph Njongwe was digging his patch of land. His spade broke through the layer of dry soil and suddenly sank further than it ever had before. He pulled it out and discovered it was wet with some dirty liquid. He assumed he had hit on an underground spring and rejoiced that his wretched soil would now be fertile. Digging further he soon lost his spade. The spring was big enough to absorb it. He called in experts from the capital to help him. Then the government itself stepped in and dispossessed Mr. Njongwe. He was given a house in Bicoco and all the land for a five kilometre radius was cordoned off. Mr. Njongwe had not discovered a spring. He had discovered the first recorded naturally occurring blood lake.

The Equatorial Guinea government has kept the existence of the lake secret until now. It has only come to light because the government has been bought off. A group of private investors led by the notorious Sir Mark Thatcher has secured the rights to the bed. They are offering shares in it at enormously inflated prices. But in their haste to acquire the rights to the bed they have been caught out in the contract. The Equatorian government has specified the limits of the bed. Neither Sir Mark Thatcher or his fellow investors know that they have been short changed. The blood beds reach far further than the contract states and cover an area twelve times larger than Equatorial Guinea itself. They spread under both land and sea. As no government has a monopoly on the blood lake the whole area is up for grabs. Take your bucket and spade now and catch the first available flight. Unimagined riches await the successful exploiters. It is the Gold Rush all over again.

It is easy to see why blood is far more valuable than oil. Nothing which runs on oil or anything else can be made to work without blood. Without enough of the red stuff to keep people alive nothing can operate. With unlimited blood people can live forever and be healthy forever. They can swap blood to get the right mix and new strains can be developed to make people more efficient at different economic functions. With unlimited blood you can also have unlimited energy. Who needs cars when we can all run at high speed to wherever we want to go? The ownership of blood is the ownership of the whole economic system of the planet and we all now have the chance to be a part of that.

The blood lake centred on Equatorial Guinea has come about as the result of its unfortunate history. In the 1970's dictator Francisco Macias Nguema allegedly massacred three-quarters of his country's population and some governments that followed had equally unsavoury reputations. The shed blood had to go somewhere. This much is understood but the dimensions of the lake have also caused a few more questions to be asked. Why does it spread into Cameroon and Gabon? What has been going on there? And why under the sea? The current theory is that the ships and men lost in the Bermuda Triangle were kidnapped by mermaids and towed to the Equatorian coast where they were done away with by local sea life. No one has seen one of those fat and deadly fish because they would not live to tell anyone if they had. Suddenly this forgotten corner of Africa has become the centre of international interest.

Go to Equatorial Guinea now and you can both rule the world and buy it many times over. Or you could start prospecting at home. The Bloody Meadow at Tewkesbury took its name from the men killed there in a mediaeval battle and the River Avon at Evesham still has its Dead Man's Dump for the same reason. Are there viable blood beds there? Or is France still the best bet? Several noble English families owe their position to possessions stolen from the French in raids during the Hundred Years War. Somewhere in the safes of their grand houses is the record of exactly where they stole their wealth from and how many French people they killed to get it. What is the betting that these families will increase their existing wealth by exploiting the blood beds they created? As always those who have are always best placed to take advantage of new ways of having. But when blood replaces oil as the most valuable commodity of all there will be little left for the have-nots to complain about. If we all have more blood than we will ever need all possessions will become worthless. Finally we will all be equal. All we will need to do is exist to be the wealthiest people who ever existed.

Look No Hands

In the past few years a new profession called the Life Coach has emerged. Since the Garden of Eden human beings have been able to live without being coached. Now apparently this is beyond the capacity of our enlightened age and many people earn a good living preying on the vulnerabilities we have chosen to give ourselves because someone told us to.

There is one area of life which always takes a great deal of application to master. It is called Getting Up In The Morning. It is so difficult because all the different parts of us get up at different times. Our good intentions are very active the second we wake up but our reason is often lazier. The arms and legs may move but the torso remains tortoise-like. Who is going to coach us to get up? How are they going to do it?

Clearly the good intention needs no motivational speeches. If it has a problem it is with focus. It can easily be led astray by the other parts of us due to their deceitful offers of justification without effort. The life coach would address this problem by blowing his whistle in its ear every ten seconds. Then it will have to pay attention to the sound and have no time to become distracted. If the good intention can remain focussed it can influence the other parts rather than the other way round and half the battle will be won.

Reason as always can think of innumerable reasons why it should stay in bed. It is hard work always having to be exactly right and work everything out before the heart does. How would the life coach tackle this? By presenting the glittering prizes reason has gained and placing them just out of reach. If reason gets going it too can create nuclear bombs and irreligious systems and analyse everything out of existence. It too can destroy every positive development by pointing out that it is by definition unreasonable. This will soon get reason moving. Staying in bed and avoiding these things would not place it in the Pantheon it has designed for itself. This carrot and stick approach would get reason following good intention without too much delay.

Arms are usually unconcerned by getting up or going to bed. They need minimal effort to move around in any direction they are jointed to. They do not need to get up to move around. It is when they are given a job that they have a problem. They shy away from any attempt to lift the rest of the body out of bed or stop it from falling if it chooses to jump out. The life coach should use psychology in this instance. Simply encourage the arms to move around as freely as possible. If they do this for long enough the rest of the body starts to ache and has to follow suit to keep up with the arms. The rate of arm movements can be gradually increased and the direction changed at irregular but significant intervals. The routine would also be changed each day to ensure the torso and legs do not become immune to it.

The legs pose a different problem. They can move around freely too but if they do they disturb the torso in a different way. They more they move the more they disturb the bedclothes and the comfort the torso craves. Here excessive movement should not be encouraged. The legs need to be coaxed forward slowly in regular straight-bent-straight combinations. Tell the legs how much of a strain it is to move then remind them what will happen to them if they get stuck between the bedclothes and cannot move at all. The slow but deliberate striving to 45 degrees and the inevitable collapse back to a weary straightness will succeed in pushing the torso up the bed and eventually expelling it as it gets exposed to the air but is too bent to spring back under the covers. The legs will then feel suffocated by being the only part left covered and their own rise will inevitably follow.

This leaves the torso. Exactly. Leave it where it is and take no notice. It is only after attention. It wants to be comfortable so it can be the centre of the body in the bed. Outside the other parts are more active and important in individual tasks. Pay it no attention at all. When the other parts move it will see it is not getting anywhere and reluctantly tag along to avoid losing face when all the other parts are moving about impressing people.

When they start setting exams for life coaches the first requirement should be to demonstrate that they can get someone out of bed in the morning. None of the coaching techniques described above is difficult in itself but using them all simultaneously is. But as in other aspects of life coaching the coach starts with a big advantage. Everyone who is physically capable of getting out of bed does so eventually. The coach can claim success every day simply because they have achieved the inevitable. It is the same with every other aspect of life coaching. The life coach can claim success as long as you remain alive. Is that really so hard? But what sort of life will you have if you hand over your fundamental responsibilities to a life coach? Do not think you never will. You have read this far haven't you?

Monomania Rules OK?

We have all had the unfortunate experience of speaking to people who cannot understand a word we are saying. It is not that they do not speak the same language as we do. The problem is that their way of looking at the world is so different from our own that they insist everything we say and do is something different to what it actually is. Someone insisting you are a thief and seeing your every movement as the first stage of an attempt to steal something for example.

In the 1970's one man who suffered from this ignorance more than most enjoyed a brief hour of fame. Life has not been too bad since. But is that any compensation for what he was subjected to by those around him? Judge for yourself.

The name of Gregory Gendle still gladdens the heart of a particular section of the population. He came to prominence in a television advertisement for the popular Licorice Allsorts. The tag line of the ad was "Every one's someone's favorite". Gendle appeared on screen for a few seconds as the narrator said: "While Gregory Gendle thinks only blue is beautiful - thanks a lot Greg". There is indeed a blue licorice allsort which is one of the more popular ones. Gendle had spent a lifetime preparing for this role. He had been expelled from several schools for looking out of the window at the sky all the time and listening to blues music to drown out all other sound. He had obtained a labouring job in a paint factory but soon lost it due to his reluctance to touch pots of non-blue paint. Living in a hostel on disability benefits due to this psychological problem he came to the notice of the advertising executives who had the licorice allsorts contract. He was persuaded to appear as himself and the ad launched his career in a quite unexpected way.

At the time Chelsea Football Club which had won major trophies a few years before was struggling under an enormous debt. The team wore blue and their theme song was 'blue is the colour'. A man who thought only blue was beautiful would clearly be a great asset to the club. Gendle was already a Chelsea fan which as in every other case was evidence of his psychiatric condition. Soon the club came calling. Gendle was asked to lead the crowd in singing on match days from a position on the touchline. His one eyed devotion to the Blues would set an example to all. Gendle could not actually sing but approached the role with an unnerving passion. The Blues could do no wrong in his eyes. Soon there was talk of promoting him to be press spokesman. He was never actually appointed to this role but the press always approached Gregory for a virulently pro-Chelsea quote so the effect was the same.

It was a couple of seasons before crowd violence at Chelsea matches got out of control. This was reported in the press as racist behaviour by whites towards blacks. On the contrary. The hooliganism was the logical conclusion of Gendle's touchline antics. White supporters objected to black supporters because they had been brought up to call them 'coloured' and their colour was not blue. Black supporters did not have the same problem because they thought of caucasians as 'white' which is not a colour. Nevertheless the culture of violence caused a great deal of harm to the club. Gregory himself disapproved of it and tried to unite fans behind the common love of blue. His efforts were in vain. Gendle's presence had proved far more of a hindrance than a help to the club and he was dismissed. The press could not speak to him anymore and he was banned from the ground. Greg could no longer be the public definition of the ultimate blue.

Greg did not object to being made the scapegoat for terrace violence. He was incapable of seeing anything objectionable in anything blue. He went back to the small flat in Fulham he was now renting and nurtured his passion further by inventing several new shades of the colour. All his clothes and furnishings were blue by this time. His fame preceded him however. Local kids got to know of his obsession and started to torment him by putting red items through his letter box. His devotion to blue now became total. He would wash his hands if he touched anything of another colour and would have to lie in a darkened room if he saw anything of another colour. He could cope with the green of the grass because blue and yellow made up the shade. Everything else however caused his nervous system to revolt. The more he suffered the more he was tormented by an unfeeling world. Eventually he lost the flat. Then he lost what remained of his dignity when he assaulted someone for urinating against a blue-painted railing. It seemed he could get no lower. But salvation as always was there all the time without him knowing it.

An ageing and jobless Gendle shut himself in his all-blue council flat. Then he saw an advertisement for a recruitment agency. It was called Blue Arrow. Surely they would understand and somehow find him a job? He found the address of the local office with great difficulty in the yellow pages he had dipped in dark blue ink. On his way there he was intercepted by someone who remembered him from Chelsea. This person was now a director of another recruitment agency called Blue Man. Could Gregory give them consultancy support by showing them how to be more blue? He accepted like a shot. Within six months he was a director himself. Only Gregory knew what is was to be totally blue and the importance of having blue people work for you. Only Gregory could identify at a glance how blue a person was even though only the bluest-looking were referred to him due to his condition. Gregory had found his calling. The Blue Man Group thrives today and remains the only employment agency specialising in blue people. Neither Gregory nor Blue Man would be where they are today without the other.

Today Gregory lives in a nine-bedroom all blue mansion deep in Hertfordshire. People see his success and feel that this compensates him for the ill effects of their ignorance. On the contrary. Gregory is still a bitter man. He has every reason to be. If the world cannot understand his way of looking at things that is the fault of the world. Should he change? A great many blue men who are clients of his company would rather die than lose their only path through life. One against the rest is an ace among other cards. Which has the higher value? Which is ultimately designed to win every glittering prize?

Our Future Letter by Letter

Our age is passing away. The generation brought up on television rather than radio is about to be replaced by a digital generation. There will be no more analog TV signals or analog anything else. All our media will be digital and the world we know will be consigned to history.

Of course the leading figures in that world will be different from the leading figures now. It is ever thus. When radio replaced the stage as the main medium great performers found themselves out of work and newcomers who were suited to the more intimate style of radio supplanted them. Talking pictures made the careers of many understated actors and ruined those of gesturing silent stars. Several people who were big on radio did not have the looks or presence for TV. We do not yet know the full implications of going digital. But already there is one development which anticipates our coming age and has been designed to take advantage of it.

For centuries singers relied on their own voices to project their notes. A singer who could not be heard in the back row would not last very long. Then came the microphone and recorded music which could be sung with tiny voices. Now those analog microphones have been replaced by digital systems. No longer are the notes of singers cast on the air and either caught by the microphone or not. Now they are stored on computers in small pieces and broken up and reassembled at will. As always singers will have to adapt to this new technology. Consequently the first Digital Singing Academy was opened last week in London. This radical organisation challenges all the accepted conventions of singing. It is also exactly what is needed if singing is going to survive the welter of computer generated noises seeking to supplant it.

Singers of our generation sing notes. Everything is supposed to be contained in each note. Digital singing separates the different parts of the note and each of these is performed individually. First there is thinking about the note. The quality of thought that goes into notes separates good singers from bad and only on digital systems can this difference be captured in its fulness. Then there is the prebreath before embarking on the breaths of the note. Then the primary and secondary breaths of the note are produced. The first acts as a magic carpet for conveying the sound and the second is overbreathing which needs to be tidied up and applied to the resonances of the auditorium. Then there is the movement of the vocal chords which produces the sound. This can now be precisely calculated by reference to the singer's throat dimensions and required pitch and thus produced by strapping a special device called a Croakometer to the singer's larynx. Then there is the force applied to the note from the front of the throat which again is produced scientifically by means of the self-correcting and self-calculating Gobophone. Then there is the explosive breath after the note is expelled which provides a platform for the next prebreath and a framework for the thought of the next note. No longer does a singer have to combine all of these elements perfectly in every note. Indeed there are now specialists emerging who will produce only one element of the note. A group called The Miserable Breathers is currently touring digital clubs in the Midlands demonstrating its ability in this niche area.

Of course the digital singer differs from the analog singer in one major respect. Digital singers no longer produce the notes. After each element of the note is laid down separately the computer mixes them together to produce the sound. In the hands of the right engineer this can be perfect every time. No longer do we have the imperfections which make singers ultra-critical of their own voices. The new breed of digital singers will surpass all who have gone before. Furthermore digital singing is open to all who have the technology. No longer are talent and a voice required. True democracy has come to the arts at last.

Here we see the ultimate benefit of the digital age. If everyone can do anything through digital technology no one can be better than anyone else. Indeed there is no reason for humans to do anything except operate the computers which take every initiative. Soon they will operate themselves and we will no longer have a reason to exist. No existence means no responsibility. Bad people can do what they like without ever being called to account for their actions. Truly we have all wished long and hard for the digital age to come. We have all achieved justification and can quietly leave the stage.

Shellfish Forever

One linguistic trend with which we are all familiar is using the names of animals to describe something else with the same characteristics. A sweet person is called a pussycat and a bad person a dog. Someone who is very crafty is called a snake and someone with very outdated ideas is called a dinosaur. It is a useful shorthand. But some of the decisions that have been made in this process are plainly absurd and ripe for review.

Many years ago Mr. Quincy Augustus De Vere Lancelot William Shakespeare Bogroll lived in the same house as myself. Never heard of him? That is because he is the world's worst poet. His productions so outrage the public taste that they and he are carefully locked away. But as with all artists his work could be divided into periods depending on its date of composition or other characteristics. Stravinsky had his Neoclassical Period and Picasso his Blue Period. When Bogroll had written around seventy verses he too felt the need for categorisation. He declared that his work of a few months earlier was his 'Crustacean Period'. Why not? But for some reason society refused to accept this. The same culture that can talk of a 'bull in a china shop' and a 'cuckoo in the nest' was unable to accept the notion of a Crustacean Period. His verses were bad enough but using the term crustacean to describe them put him beyond the pale.

We are supposed to conclude one of two things. Either that there is something inherently wrong with describing something as crustacean but not with describing it as something else connected with the animal kingdom. Or that the public is simply not used to things being called crustacean and fears the unknown. As each animal is equally inferior to humans surely the latter is true. But what else apart from the verse of Bogroll could be described as crustacean? What characteristics can be invoked by applying the name 'crustacean' to a person or object?

Crustaceans are hard on the outside and soft on the inside. They are also strange shapes and unusual colours. It would therefore be reasonable to describe the East End of London as the Crustacean Area. Hard men in the streets of Whitechapel would be known by nicknames such as "Lobster" and "Prawn". If Lobster was murdered by fellow gangsters it would be Lobster Pate. If Prawn murdered someone they would be made into Prawn Cocktail. They would all drive vintage Abarth cars and sell oysters in the markets to support their other rackets. The local economy would benefit from crustacean related tourism such as visits to murder sites and local community centres would be named after the shellfish native to the community they served. The Bangladeshi Crab Centre would be a thing of beauty. This rebranding as the Crustacean Area would certainly make the term acceptable to everyone. But what would it tell us about the verse of Bogroll? Would the acceptance of the term Crustacean be enough to ensure that his verse of a certain period was automatically given this title?

Crustacean verse would have to be impenetrable on sight with its meaning only reached after the greatest difficulty. It would be strange to look at or contemplate and best approached when it is cut into little pieces and covered with something more acceptable. Exactly! No longer will crustaceans be omitted from the canon of meaningful animal based usages. They have found their calling. The verse of Bogroll was indeed purely crustacean in character and without any reference at all to the East End of London we can extrapolate the figurative meaning of crustacean from there.

Here for the first time in the public print is a sample of Crustacean Period verse. Judge for yourself whether it meets the criteria.

"Now I shall speak of burning dogs -
Hereward the Wake might enter the question
As he often does
And a mint pie will come by and by.
Mashed-out tomatoes will go bubbly
Crashed-out planes will wreck the wreckage
Soapiness is a kind of tart.
My best friend was once a plain smock
Grown ornate in a field of concrete.
I wish my hand wouldn't throb so,
I want to grip time itself with it,
Turn inclined planes into wet shirts,
I wish that dog would stop doing that, it's disgusting."

Clearly no right thinking person could disagree that crustacean has finally found its true meaning. Crustacean rap music anyone?

The Mirror Versus The Smoke

A few years ago a statue of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his wheelchair was erected. During his lifetime FDR did everything he could to disguise the fact he was wheelchair-bound. Now we are more comfortable with disability we are happy to embrace the idea that a disabled man can be a major world statesman.

This however makes another case all the more unusual. Those who know something about neurosciences hold the name of Andrea Verga in great esteem. This nineteenth century figure revived interest in his discipline and made a number of contributions to his field that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. Yet few are aware of the disability he had to overcome to achieve the things he did.

Andrea Verga was born in Trevilglio near Bergamo in 1811. His original desire to become a butcher was frustrated by his snobbish parents and instead he became an anatomist. In time he rose through the ranks and by 1851 he had become Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan. This demonstrates that he had understood that the diseases of both brain and body should be taken together which is a perception seemingly foreign to his modern counterparts.

Verga lives in history for his discovery of the Cavum Vergae. This is described in a wonderful piece of abstract prose as "An inconstant horizontal slitlike space between the posterior one-third of the corpus callosum and the underlying commissura fornicis (commissura hippocampi; psalterium) resulting from failure of these two commissural plates to fuse completely during foetal development; like the cavity of the septum pellucidum, the space is not a true ventricle in the sense that it did not develop from the central canal of the neural tube." Amazingly some people actually know what all that means. He also reported the first "macroscopic and microscopic descriptions of pituitary adenomas in acromegalic patients." Again your guess is as good as mine but apparently this was something big which paved the way for more accurate work later and more discoveries. Verga lived until 1895 and was buried with adulation by the scientific community. They had to show somebody that their work actually meant anything. He is remembered in a street name in Milan and also by a statue outside what is now Milan University.

Verga is not mentioned anywhere as a disabled man. His statue however tells a different story. Unusually for an anatomist Andrea Verga had no arms. It was bold of the Italians to portray him in that way but on this realistic stone sculpture where every whisker of his beard is articulated there are no arms to be seen. Maybe being an anatomist with this handicap was considered so incredible that no one would dare remark on his disability in their accounts of the man and his work. But there is no reason to leave the arms off a realistic sculpture if he had them. Verga was clearly more of an achiever than even his admirers would concede and the non-scientific world would relate to his achievements all the more if they were made aware of this astonishing fact.

It is well known that King David had no arms. He slew Goliath and wrote the Psalms in spite of this handicap so graphically recorded by Michelangelo. Similarly Rameses the Great and several other Egyptian rulers had no noses as their monuments make clear. We should therefore be prepared to accept disability as a necessary accompaniment to high status and achievement. Maybe that is the reason for disability discrimination. Most of us will never be kings or world famous scientists or religious leaders. If someone with the disability to become one of these things appears before us we are bound to expect that they will be the things we are not. If they show themselves to be no different apart from their disability it is reasonable to think that they are not deserving of the respect which goes with their status and a whole industry of abuse has therefore unwittingly developed as a result.

In America there was once a glut of films portraying disabled detectives. Longstreet was blind and Ironside paraplegic. Cannon was fat and Columbo mentally retarded. Only by portraying the detective who always won as disabled could they give him credibility. So why did it take America so long to portray Roosevelt as he was? Because he was the only American President in a wheelchair. Other Presidents had their own disabilities and their own similarly disabled funders to keep onside. If they drew attention to Roosevelt's particular disability it would mean promoting that one group of disabled ahead of their own supporters. People would vote for wheelchair candidates rather than people who cannot construct a sentence like George W. Bush and the backers of those who created that situation would soon leave their previously favoured candidates in the lurch. No one wants to be the one who bequeaths such a legacy to his successors.

There should be no problem with acknowledging the disabilities which all achievers seem to have. Andrea Verga having no arms should be public knowledge. But it would be an even greater advancement in public morals if those who achieved great things but had no disability at all were recognised as such. Ignoring disabilities simply obscures the real achievements of the genuinely able-bodied. Disability discrimination is ultimately discrimination against the non-disabled. Maybe it is disabled people themselves who are therefore actually behind it. Enough people have gained enough cheap publicity from their handicaps. Now we know why the media magnates who rose from humble origins are so keen to let them.

It Came Round About But It Came

This morning the newspapers are full of a new British heroine. Her name is Anna Hingley and she has become the first woman to cross Australia by horse.

There is no doubting that this is a significant achievement. It is however important to keep it in context. Australia has many horses. Sooner or later a woman was going to saddle one and cross the country with it. Furthermore men have been doing it for years. Although certainly deserving of praise the achievement pales into insignificance beside the valiant attempts to cross Australia by things which do not exist there. History bears many examples of the brave and ultimately futile attempts to accomplish one particularly astounding feat.

The first attempt to cross Australia by Slow Left Arm Bowler took place as long ago as 1867. A team sponsored by the notorious rake and adventurer Lord Philip Schofield hired a Yorkshire village cricketer called Davis to bowl his way across the country with the intrepid travellers pitching tents in his wake. The fact that no one remembers the forename of Mr. Davis demonstrates that he was declared professional on joining the expedition and consequently had no future in village cricket should he return. The party decamped in Sydney and sought to bowl its way to Perth. Unfortunately then as now Australia proved a poor hunting ground for the slow left armer. This type of cricketer does not exist there because the pitches are not receptive to the technique. The party which arrived with great fanfare was followed by a large crowd of settlers armed with every sort of bat imaginable. The crowd easily whacked Davis back over his head into the harbour time and time again and most of the first week was spent retrieving an increasingly sodden ball from the dingo-infested waters. Finally most of the party left to gamble their way to enough winnings for the passage home while Davis continued alone. With no one to umpire him he increasingly strayed into no balls and wides and with no wicketkeeper byes were inevitable every ball. Eventually he gave up about ten miles outside the city with horrendously expensive figures and settled in the outback where he lived by selling a book about his experiences which he translated into Kangaroo and Wombat.

The second attempt in 1884 learned some of the lessons of the first. A team of eleven set out from England captained by an actual cricketer in the Hon. Tennyson Morley Morley Morley of Winchester College. Each member of the team had a specific fielding position and three of them were slow left arm bowlers who worked in relays. Furthermore they avoided local batsmen by bowling at night. Progressing from the Queensland Coast they came to a small town inside the New South Wales Border. Here the expedition began to founder. The weary party arrived as dawn was breaking and yet another local shindig was beginning. The team could not resist joining in the festivities and got thoroughly drunk before asking what the name of the town was. When told it was Wee Waa hysterical laughter broke out among the reserved English gentlemen. Two of the bowlers were sent home with split sides and a third was still laughing when visited in confinement seven years later. The rest were in no fit state to continue due to a combination of dehydration through shedding tears of mirth and being assaulted by the insulted locals. The British government telegraphed the colonial administration and demanded that the name of this town be changed. When it refused Britain declared an expedition embargo on Australia which almost brought the country to its knees but paved the way for further immigration from other parts of the world whose own adventurers rediscovered cowpats and other Australian delicacies.

With no more British expeditions the Australians themselves made several attempts. Hiring British bowlers from as far afield as Devon and Dundee a number of famous parties set out with the hopes of a nation resting on them. They have been immortalised in the bush ballads of Harry Cackbottom and Sludgie McGurkwash amongst others. The tale of Ron the Con and Flatbellied Don who attempted the crossing double handed is sung by every Australian. But all the Australian expeditions foundered through a lack of balance. Sometimes a member of the party would keel over and die because they did not say the word 'mate' at the end of a sentence. Then they would collapse into arguments and disarray because everyone was addressed as 'mate' by everyone else and no one could distinguish who was who. It would be several years before 'Bruce' became the first and last Australian name. After the seventh such expedition the natives had had enough. There would be no more attempts to cross Australia by Slow Left Arm Bowler and this final frontier would remain unbreached by man.

This was not quite the end of the story. A joint English-Australian-West Indian team set out in 1965 in the hope of raising interest in future cricket series' involving these countries. It was a disaster. West Indians only joined in to show they had slow left armers in their islands and did not appreciate being asked to do other duties. The English supplied the main bowlers but discovered Australians could not field to them. The Australians were hounded by their own press who felt they were betraying the country by helping Pommie bowlers cross it. The expedition ended two weeks after it had begun in the middle of the Australian desert. But one good thing came out of it. Scientists had used the expedition to measure variations in flight and action amongst the bowlers to calculate exactly how a future expedition should bowl and what its route should be. Their calculations were controversial because they concluded that they should start in New Zealand and finish in Canada. But at least the groundwork had been laid if at some future date there was someone with a bottomless pit of money to resource an expedition and enough bowlers capable of fulfilling the requirements. This has not happened yet. But who is to say that in this day and age the raw material cannot rise to make the theory a reality?

Today the minds of the world return to this final great adventure. Those scientists never calculated how women or horses could cross Australia by Slow Left Arm Bowler. Maybe they are the missing element. Since when did women have enough sense of humour to injure themselves laughing at Wee Waa? Since when did horses have names as simple as humans? It only takes a few training sessions to get them up to the standard. Maybe the real achievement of Anna Hingley is entirely different to the one being rightly celebrated in so many stables and knitting circles today.

From Him To Eternity

In North London there is a restaurant called Dante. By using this name the owners are implying that it is a place of quality and culture. Their assertion is slightly undermined by the fact that the drawing on its logo is not of Dante but of King Henry the Eighth. He too was a person of quality and culture but if the owners also were they would be able to tell the difference between the two.

The only justification that the owners could have for such an error is if they were members of a little-known religious sect. In America there is an organisation called the Saint Germain Foundation which worships a figure from the French court who they believe manifested himself throughout history as many other people such as Christopher Columbus and George Washington. He is treated as an Ascended Master of great wisdom. Maybe there is a sect which thinks Dante and Henry the Eighth are one and the same. If so I would not like to have them living next door to me. Just imagine how this figure would argue with itself about which circle of Hell its wives were in! Such a tortured soul could only attract equally tortured followers.

There is however good reason to believe that several famous people who lived at different times are in fact one and the same. Examine the evidence and then prove the contrary if you will.

There has been much speculation over the last 400 years about the true identity of Shakespeare. Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are among those who have been postulated as the 'true' author of Shakespeare's plays. The longer time goes on the more evidence emerges that their author was in fact the same William Shakespeare who always claimed to be the author. But why is there any dispute about this in the first place? Did anyone dispute the authorship of almost equally great figures such as Chaucer or Dickens? It is because William Shakespeare was one manifestation of a multiformed figure of great wisdom. How can we tell? Because he came from Warwickshire as all the best people do. All you need to understand is the natural superiority of the Warwickshire man to all others. Then the true identity of Shakespeare becomes clear.

The first Warwickshire man to gain public prominence was Richard Neville the Earl of Warwick. He was allegedly killed in the Wars of the Roses. How can anyone tell? There were no dental records or DNA evidence in those days. It is equally likely he instructed a servant to die for him then disappeared. No one can disprove this. With his family connections he could hide where he wanted and be born again to any woman he chose to put Warwickshire back on top. Hence the universal reverence for Shakespeare and his own recorded self-regard. Hence the subsequent rise to greatness of the Birmingham of its great industrial fathers. All of these were further manifestations of Warwick rising to supremacy. These would have been enough. But his two greatest manifestations had yet to come.

In the 1880s the most famous product of Birmingham was Aston Villa Football Club. It won the FA Cup in 1887 and the double in 1897. It was the first working class football club to see itself as grand. The books say a trio of Scots were responsible for its rise to greatness. This ignores the contribution of local Warwickshire players who always outnumbered them. One of these was an obscure chap called 'Bat' Garvey. Garvey did not play very often but he must have been the presiding genius of the club. Why? Because he was not only local but came to Villa from a club called Aston Shakespeare. That should have given people a clue. He stayed with them through all their great years in different capacities. That is until there were no more worlds to conquer. Birmingham and Warwickshire had been on top in the real world for long enough. Now it was time to take over an alternate reality. Here the final and present manifestation of Warwick began to emerge.

With the rise of public literacy it was only a matter of time before someone invented the comic book. The world of comics was not that much different to the one the rest of us live in. Except it was ruled by superheroes. We can all name Superman, Spiderman, Popeye, Pansy Potter. We can also name Batman. Now you see why the death of Bat Garvey was never recorded. If all the superheroes had a fight Batman would emerge victorious. Why? He is a Warwickshire man. He is the latest manifestation of the Earl of Warwick and his innate superiority to others. It is a shame Adam West and Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer have never mastered the accent. But here once again is The Earl of Warwick rising to the top in a new form to demonstrate the natural superiority of my kind over all others. Here once again is the natural order of society restored in a plane beyond the imagination of even Warwick himself in the first instance. This just shows once again the greatness of the man.

It would be wrong to make a religion out of the Earl of Warwick and his different forms. But that is the fault of religion not him. Religion is based on truths revealed through belief. Warwick is truth revealed through existence. He leaves wise sayings and great achievements. But greater than all of these is the simple fact of being a Warwickshire man. The manifestations of Warwick are Warwickshire men in their fulness. But latent within all of us from the county is the capacity to rise in the same way. Non-Warwickshire men will never know this. We should not care. As existers rather than believers we cannot expect a world based on an inferior form of truth to grasp its ultimate destiny of being ruled by the men of Warwickshire.

Men They Once Were And Could Be Again

Mankind has always expressed things by using colour. The colours adopted on coats of arms or by sports teams are precisely formulated and have a distinct meaning. By changing the colour of something you change the nature of the thing and with it its significance to your target audience. You cannot buy British-grown baked beans for example because they are black. They taste OK but baked beans are always white under the sauce. No one will buy baked beans which are black as all the weight of their historic appreciation would be lost and they would have to compete with forgotten or unpopular dishes for a much smaller market.

This brings us to the case of the red chessmen. Look at oriental sets or even mediaeval European ones and you see them all the time. Now they have been transformed to black. Is black cheaper to produce than red? No. The alteration is the sole visual sign of a quite remarkable tale.

As we all know the white men have the first move in chess. It is expected. The pure unsullied ivory will always take the first step as it is the innocent beginning of a new dawn. The stained ivory of the red will follow with its experience and observe the movement of the virginal white. It hangs there ready to take advantage of the mistakes of inexperience. It challenges the newcomer to prove itself by taking advantage of having made the first move.

Early players were aware of this distinction. It was customary for the less experienced player to be given the white men and with them the first move. The better player waited to gobble them up. The non-white men were originally several different colours. Eventually red became the standard for one simple reason. Experienced players were always likely to prevail over less experienced. Red represented the blood of the white men as they were gradually hacked down by the better moves of the coloured ones.

Things continued this way until around 1550. By then the relative levels of experience in chess had levelled out. There was no longer such an advantage in having played more often than your opponent. Consequently the first move became a greater and greater advantage. White began to dominate so much that the draw for colour was developed to give both players a chance of using it. This was not all. The red men suddenly appeared redder than before. Their colour got deeper and richer. Soon it became obvious what was happening on the board. The red men were getting redder because it was their own blood which was being shed on contact with the white. The blood of the anaemic whites was too pale to affect the original stain. Now defeated red men were turning practically purple at each new slaughter. In some sets it got so bad that the red men had to be drained before each game.

Clearly something needed to be done. In one brilliant stroke the celebrated Father Feneredo of Galicia transformed the game. Reckoning that all the red men would turn black eventually with the sheer amount of blood they were shedding he introduced new black men by slowly burning red ones with a toasting iron. This is the same method used today for the top level chessmen used in international tournaments. Father Feneredo may not have been fully aware of the consequences of what he was doing but the world soon realised that black is not a colour but a non-colour. It is therefore devoid of emotion. Father Feneredo had created chessmen which simply fulfilled their mathematical obligations and could not engage on a personal level with their opposite numbers. The previously innocent whites which could no longer see their whiteness reflected soon followed suit. Soon only the players could engage with each other emotionally. What were once chessmen were now chess pieces. No more blood was spilled. No emotion ever entered the game of chess again. It became the last refuge of the technical and the bored whose twisted mentalities prevented them from ever engaging with other human beings and the men mere functionaries at the service of non-aggressive minds.

Black pieces never show the blood of whites. It has ceased to flow. No longer can a budding general talk to chessmen to learn his craft. The healthy violence of early chess is now a collection of pointless theories which have no relevance outside the game. Is this of any use? Chess players would like us to think so. Clearly the idea is erroneous however as the practitioners would not bear the dismissive title of 'players' if what they were doing had any real value. Modern men complain of being more and more castrated as society re-evaluates their traditional role. There is a way of fighting back. Refuse to buy black chess pieces. In certain parts of East Africa they contend that what we call white people are actually red in colour. Clearly all the male gender needs to do is allow East Africans to set all our standards for us to become real men again.

If You Know Where To Look

One of the features of modern life is the homosexualisation of public figures. It seems that not a month goes by without some important person of past or present being declared a closet homosexual. It would appear that throughout its history the United Kingdom and its predecessor states have been run by a self-supporting network of closet homosexuals.

There may be some truth in some of these claims. They do however avoid the real issue. The country has indeed always been run by people who pretend to be something they are not. But it is not sexuality which is the issue.

Underneath the old War Office building in London is a small room which is hardly ever opened. This is not as you might expect a secret strategy room where generals and admirals devised their cunning plans. It is known in government circles as the dead letter room. It does not contain the sort of letters people write to each other on paper. It contains actual letters. Each one is signed by its original owner and placed there in an individual drawer with a combination lock. These letters are the last remnants of the true identities of certain famous people who discarded them to move on to bigger and better things.

Each drawer in the dead letter room bears the date the letter was placed in it. One bears the date 1832. This contains the letter 'w' with a signature upon it familiar to all political biographers. It originally belonged to William Ewart Gladstone who subsequently became a celebrated Prime Minister. It is the second letter of his surname. Gladstone had property in North Wales because he was actually born Gwillym Evan Gwladstone. Changing the first part was easy because anglicisation of forenames was forced upon the Welsh. The surname however was never changed as the English needed a means of identifying members of the conquered nation who strayed outside their pale of settlement. Gwladstone had enough friends to protect him when he first stood for parliament without telling people he was Welsh. When he was elected however he removed the w from his name in order to be allowed to visit certain English border towns which still had mediaeval bye-laws against the Welsh setting foot there. Anyone who aspired to high office would of course be obliged to respect these laws. Not until damp threatened the dead letter room in 1998 did the secret come out. But then other secrets began emerging too.

Gladstone was once succeeded as Prime Minister by the brilliant Lord Rosebery. This highly intelligent nobleman had come from nowhere and quickly disappeared there again. We now know why he came from nowhere. The dead letter room contains a 'h' subtracted from his name and a receipt for a missing 'e'. He was originally LLoyd Rhosbery. He altered the original anglicisation of his forename from Leonard to Lord when the real Earl of Rosebery died leaving no heir and then discarded the 'h' and borrowed the 'e' to complete the deception. Various details of the life of Rhosbery have always been elusive to biographers. Now we know why he was so secretive. There was no crime in being Welsh in itself as David LLoyd George later demonstrated. But admitting it in polite society was quite another which is why David LLoyd George took to selling peerages to create a new polite society that would find his origins acceptable.

At first the men who treated the dead letter room for damp thought the discarding of Cambrianising letters was a nineteenth century phenomenon. How wrong they have subsequently been proved to be. There is the now well-known case of Ramsay MacDonald who was originally known as Ram's Ear Machynlleth before his accent was mistaken for Scottish and a way out presented itself. The Ram's Ear refers to an unfortunate family incident. From the eighteenth century there were the two William Pitts who were in fact miners called Gil the Pit. Even in the late twentieth century the pattern persisted. James Callaghan was driven to represent Cardiff Southeast by his original surname of Caradoghan. Sir Alec Douglas-Home was originally Siraloc Dwglas Huw. Few also could forget the most recent unmasking when former Israeli Premier Menachem Begin who had started his political life as a London Zionist was shown to be a Reformed monk called Mynach am Brecon. Few also could forget the anger this exposure provoked in Welsh speakers whom Begin had refused to make a priority when Prime Minister of Israel.

There are too many names to be merely coincidence. The United Kingdom has been run not by a network of closet homosexuals but a network of closet Welshmen. Other evidence? Politicians always think they are being picked on and driven out by dark forces. This is the entire Welsh character is it not? Each individual will now decide for themselves whether being homosexual or being Welsh is the greater threat to what we know as civilization.

That Magic Ingredient

The American runner Steve Prefontaine had a distinguished career before his untimely death in a road accident. He made his name as a teenage prodigy and attended the University of Oregon which had an outstanding athletics program. He was a favourite for the 1976 Games which he did not live to see. In spite of this however there was a slight concern about his running. Up until 1972 he was a brilliant prospect. After his Olympic failure that year he was still performing as well as anyone but there was something missing. He ran well technically. But it was widely remarked that for some reason "the spark had gone".

So what is that spark which runners had in the days before drugs took over? How were those who had The Spark distinguished from the rest? What advantage did it give them over runners who did not have it?

With male runners there is a major clue. In the early 1970s it was considered bad form to run without hair. David Bedford set middle distance records with a Zapata tache and Lasse Viren won two Olympic titles with Nordic moustache and beard. Prefontaine also had a trademark moustache although he did not live long enough to sell it on e-bay as Nigel Mansell and other famous wearers subsequently did. The athletes with a spark were easily identified by the stiffness of their moustaches. Most moustachioed men who run find their moustaches drooping after their exertions and dripping with sweat. The Spark enabled the moustaches to remain lustrous and taut throughout. This God given gift has the practical benefit of reducing drag coefficient. It also instils in the athlete a belief that he too will never fall or decline in any way. Maybe that is what led later clean shaven runners to experiment with drugs to try and gain the spark of their predecessors. Either way the positive effects of The Spark were clear on the face as well as on the track and a wide group of viewers were therefore able to appreciate the special qualities of the elite athlete.

With female athletes the situation was different. They did not grow beards in those days although that cannot be guaranteed now with the drugs some of them take. Female athletes with The Spark were distinguished by their inability to smile. Take pentathlon champion Mary Peters. She has become a well known personality since retirement and her smiling face is often seen promoting sport and her native Northern Ireland. On the track however it was entirely different. She was constantly scowling with concentration during her event because The Spark gave her an inner glow which could not be expressed by a smile. A smile could only be generated by external mental stimulus which was a distraction from the inner glow and not as strong emotively. Athletes without The Spark had to smile while they were competing to obtain enough stimulus to compete at all. Modern athletes without The Spark once took to perpetual scowling to replicate it but have now realised that this just makes them miserable. The most recent alternative strategy is to argue about money in the name of "the best interests of the sport" thinking this makes them a serious athlete.

The other factor common to both genders which distinguishes an athlete with The Spark is an inability to walk. Most of us learn to walk as children and any other means of self-locomotion we learn is a bonus. It is not the norm. For great runners the opposite is true. Running is the norm and walking is unusual. In other fields of human activity the high achievers have great ability in their fields and a corresponding deficiency elsewhere. Scientists cannot always spell or paint for example. Runners with The Spark are only able to function properly when they are running. Observe the performance of former runners who take up television commentary. Hear the incomparably more felicitous phrases they come out with when they run across the track to conduct an interview compared with their efforts when sitting in a box. For most of us it would be the other way round. Steve Ovett now has restricted mobility due to a motorbike accident and Prefontaine was driving his car when he lost his life in his accident. Was the lack of co-ordination which was a factor in these accidents the inevitable consequence of them not running at the time? One cannot say for sure but no non-runner could dare presume otherwise.

The Spark set runners apart and gave them a particular advantage. Lesser runners eventually cracked under the strain of being constantly expected to train and compete at the highest level. They would fall by the wayside when they failed to be the superhuman beings their sport and its sponsors demanded. Runners who had The Spark were likewise liable to have off days. But only human beings have those. If you had The Spark it was established that you were more than human in the first place. Therefore your off days never really happened. What was an off day to a lesser athlete was restraint on your part. If you had The Spark you had physical credentials beyond your control which were manifest to everyone. Who cared if you always produced when you carried on displaying them? Surely that is the position we would all like to be in. Hence the respect accorded to The Spark and those presumed to have it.

The Higher Generation

There is a standing joke in America about entrepreneurs getting younger and younger. We have seen the TV sketches about business owners sacking their parents and doing their school homework at the reception desk of their fast food outlet. The implication is that the spirit of self-reliance in America has been taken a few steps too far and led to an absurd situation.

In the U.K. we can do better than this. Here there is a thriving culture of child entrepreneurship. The contribution of children to the economy has always been measured in terms of the things their parents buy for them. Now children are earning their own crust and many of us think this is not before time.

Recently children have started wearing t-shirts with a business slogan on them. It reads "Parents For Sale - Buy One Get One Free". This is assumed to be a joke. Yet there are very few instances when a child wearing this t-shirt is actually accompanied by both parents. The right of children to divorce their parents was established in various legal cases in America and the principle behind this has now been brought to fruition here. Child entrepreneurs are selling parents to the highest bidders to ensure everyone gets a better life. Most children would rather have different parents than their own. By redistributing existing parents to homes where they would be loved and appreciated the child entrepreneurs of the U.K. are performing a valuable social service and rightly enjoying the rewards of their labours. Of course children do not have the money to buy better parents unless they have already made it by selling their original parents. It comes as no surprise therefore that parent selling began as one of the internal markets of the Jewish community whose members have sustained it for centuries by trading their own religious items and other relevant goods among themselves before reaching out to the general population.

When a child is born in the U.K. to immigrant parents whose status in the country has not been decided the child is left in limbo. It has no status even after its parents have been granted it as it could not have been included in the original application. When the child is born it must fill in its own application to remain in the U.K. and there is no provision on that form for anyone to answer questions on its behalf. Some older children have begun to exploit this situation by refusing to unlearn their initial manners of speech. All over the world babies speak an international baby language whose primitive sounds have the same meaning in every country regardless of its linguistic culture. U.K. immigration forms however can only be completed in English. Check any number of immigration forms filled in by babies and you will find them all written in this language. The services of young child entrepreneurs as baby language-to-English translators are clearly much in demand and as no Baby-to-English dictionary has yet been published this will continue to be so into the foreseeable future.

The third area in which child entrepreneurs have made a considerable impact is in education. Traditionally children have been seen as the consumers of education. Now there is clear evidence that they are the providers. A number of educational establishments offer distance learning courses in which people study in their own time for qualifications issued by that establishment. Each of these courses is accessed by completing an application form. Each form comes with instructions on how to fill it in. It has become the rule that the higher the level of qualification sought the more detailed the instructions are on how to fill the form in. There is a well known English university which I will not name called Cambridge. Their external degree courses are accessed by such an application form. The first thing to fill in on the form is the applicant's name. The accompanying instructions explain what a name is and give advice as to where to look if you do not know what your name is and have to find out. Educationalists always think that everyone who is intelligent is like themselves. The more intelligent someone may be presumed to be the more they are treated as children by those who set their exams. Has education therefore been taken over by children? People are paying for these courses all the time and it is a nice little earner for someone not old enough to be taxed to turn the tables on the adults who have failed to understand them for so long.

We could all do a lot worse than allow children to become our leading entrepreneurs. Indeed in many immigrant communities teenage children quickly become the main earners in a family whilst the parents are deemed unemployable due to lack of U.K. qualifications. Surely the only way to integrate all parts of society is to make child entrepreneurship truly available to all? No more frustrated kids. No more parents complaining at having to look after them. Creating wealth the province of those who have the energy and spending it the province of those who have the sense. Can you think of a better way? Of course not. You have probably long forgotten your childhood if you are reading this post.