Competitions and a raincoat

It is many years since I subscribed to New Statesman—in fact, I don't think I ever did, I used to read it in the library—but for some reason they often send me a free copy. This is nice, for although I would no longer want to buy it every fortnight, I enjoy seeing an occasional copy for nostalgia's sake.
  
I am happy to know that their competition is still going strong: it has reached No 4174, which called for poems on the subject of any well-known proverb and attracted many entries. There were several clever and elegant ones, but my favourite among the prizewinners was short and simple:
Don't keep a dog...
I kept a dog and barked myself
And now my throat is sore.
The burglars only laughed at me
And busted in my door.
They stole my money and my jewels.
They stole my private log.
I only wish they'd thought to steal
That stupid, silent dog.

In 1949 the competition was for parodies of Graham Greene's writing style; famously, the author himself submitted an entry under the pen name "N. Wilkinson" and won second prize. In 1965 Greene again entered a similar New Statesman competition under a pseudonym, and won an honourable mention.

I too entered a few times but never got even an honourable mention. However, as with all literary competitions the prizes were miserably small book tokens (they are still only £25 and some Tesco vouchers) so I soon gave up trying and later my pride was salvaged when I did win £50, a lot of money in those days, in a newspaper competition.

This was in the Observer and was for a parody of one of their regular feature writers; I chose Pierre d'Harcourt who wrote on travel (merely a slim column—lavishly illustrated colour supplements were way in the future), aimed squarely at discriminating travellers, not the holiday-making masses. Fifty years later I recycled my entry as one of the first posts in Other Men's Flowers.
   
I spent my winnings on a Gannex raincoat; Harold Wilson quickly followed my example and wore one on a world tour in 1956. They became fashion icons, and were worn by Lyndon Johnson, Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev, as well as the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the royal corgis. In addition they were worn by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, Himalayan climbers, the armed services, and police forces in Britain and Canada, and the success of the new fabric made Joseph Kagan a multi-millionaire, while Wilson made him a life peer.

He was later charged with tax evasion, though the formal charges were styled as "theft" and "false accounting", to comply with extradition treaties which did not cover tax offences. After a stay in Israel, he was arrested in Paris. On December 12, 1980, he was convicted of four counts of theft, fined £375,000 and served a ten-month sentence. He lost his knighthood, but his peerage could not be forfeited and on release from custody he returned to the House of Lords and spoke on prison reform.
[Wikipedia]

Vorsprung durch Lachen

Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg loved a good joke but discovered during the First World War that these were not commonly found in East Prussia, where he had made his military career, and that worldwide appreciation of German humour was at a very low ebb in the 1920s. When he became President of the Weimar Republic in 1925 one of his first actions was to issue a decree establishing a government department called the Humorabteilung under the command of a powerful official, the Staatswitzmeister, responsible for organising training courses for aspiring comedians and taking measures to raise the general standard of German jokes.

This had moderate success in the following years until 1934, when Hindenburg died and Adolf Hitler came to power. None of the Nazi leaders had any sense of humour at all (Julius Streicher published a comic newspaper for some years but the cartoons were whimsical rather than funny). The Humorabteilung was closed down, the post of Staatswitzmeister was abolished, the Third Reich was declared to be a Lachenfrei state and jokes of any kind were forbidden.

After the Second World War glumness prevailed throughout Germany and very little laughter was heard for some years. Then, in 1949, Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor of the Federal Republic of West Germany at the age of 79. He had been a popular stand-up comedian in Berlin nightclubs in the 1920s ("History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided” was one of his quips, but it sounded better in German and anyway it was the way he told it). Under his leadership a Lustspielhaus was set up in all major cities and the bierkellers echoed with Teutonic chortling once more.

Today, of course, Germany has regained its place among the top joke-making nations of Europe, and every German institution or company has its Lachenbüro with a qualified Witzleiter in charge, turning out a stream of comedy which in quality and scope has not been seen since the days of the Hohenzollerns.

.

Fooled

Look, I can't really be criticized for being fooled yesterday, can I? It was only for a few seconds; well, say half a minute. I mean, I hadn't been up for very long, and hadn't yet had any coffee, so it was with bleary eyes and half my attention that I was glancing at the Guardian while dispiritedly chewing some of those polystyrene granules which, with a little dried fruit and semi-skimmed milk, masquerade as a healthy breakfast.

Thus, it was with mounting horror that I started to read a news item to the effect that the paper will in future be published via Twitter, the social networking service which enables anyone with an internet connection to tell the world when they are feeling sad, or thinking about having a cup of tea. Further, a project is underway to rewrite the whole of the paper's archives, stretching back to 1821, in the form of 140-character text messages, known as "tweets".

But I had realised what the date was before I reached the bit about the archive.

The rest of the news article was very nearly convincing. I read on to learn that some major archive items already twitterised include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; "Berlin Wall falls! Majority view of Twitterers = it's a historic moment! What do you think? Have your say" and "JFK assassin8ed @ Dallas, def heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

And Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech appears in the Guardian's twitterised archive as "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by", eliminating the waffle and bluster of the originals.

The whole story is here and seems to me to be worthy to be ranked with the classics such as the BBC 1957 spaghetti harvest and the Guardian's 1977 seven-page supplement about San Serriffe. These and others are discussed here.

How Long, O Lord......?

Several of my more devout friends have complained that Other Men's Flowers, while purporting to be a veritable compendium of literary reference, is curiously deficient in biblical quotations. As a first step towards putting this right, I print here the last of all the antediluvian stories, which appears in many places on the internet, usually uncredited. The original version was written by Keith Waterhouse:

And God said unto Noah, Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and the length of the ark shall be 300 cubits. And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee.

And Noah said, Sign here, and leavest Thou a deposit.

And the Lord signed there, and left He a deposit.

And Noah was 600 years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.

And the Lord said unto Noah, Where is the ark, which I commanded thee to build?

And Noah said unto the Lord, Verily, I have had three carpenters off ill. The gopher wood supplier hath let me down - yea, even though the gopher wood hath been on order for nigh upon 12 months. The damp-course specialist hath not turned up. What can I do, O Lord ?

And God said unto Noah, I want that ark finished even after seven days and seven nights.

And Noah said, It will be so.

And it was not so.

And the Lord said unto Noah, What seemeth to be the trouble this time?

And Noah said unto the Lord, Mine sub-contractor hath gone bankrupt. The pitch which Thou commandest me to put on the outside and on the inside of the ark hath not arrived, and the plumber hath gone on strike.

Noah rent his garments and said, The glazier departeth on holiday to Majorca - yea, even though I offerest him double time. Shem, my son, who helpeth me on the ark side of the business hath formed a pop group with his brothers Ham and Japheth. Lord, I am undone.

And God said in his wrath, Noah, do not thou mucketh Me about. The end of all flesh is come before me; for the Earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the Earth. How can I destroy them with the earth if thou art incapable of completing the job that thou was contracted to do?

And Noah said, Lo, the contract will be fulfilled.

And Lo, it was not fulfilled.

And Noah said unto the Lord, The gopher wood is definitely in the warehouse. Verily, and the gopher wood supplier waiteth only upon his servant to find the invoices before he delivereth the gopher wood unto me.

And the Lord grew angry and said, Scrubbeth thou round the gopher wood. What about the animals? Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the Earth after his kind two of every sort have I ordered to come unto thee, to keep them alive. Where for example, are the giraffes?

And Noah said unto the Lord, They are expected today.

And the Lord said unto Noah, How about the unicorns?

And Noah wrung his hands and wept, saying, Lord, Lord, they are a discontinued line. Thou canst not get unicorns for love nor money.

And God said, Come thou, Noah, I have left with thee a deposit, and thou hast signed a contract. Where are the monkeys, and the bears, and the hippopotami, and the elephants, and the zebras and the hartebeests, two of each kind; and of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female?

And Noah said unto the Lord, They have been delivered unto the wrong address, but should arriveth on Friday; all save the fowls of the air by sevens, for it hath just been told unto me that fowls of the air are sold only in half-dozens.

And God said unto Noah, Thou hast not made an ark of gopher wood, nor hast thou lined it with pitch within and with-out; and of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort hast thou failed to bring into the ark. What sayest thou, Noah?

And Noah kissed the Earth and said, Lord, Lord, thou knowest in thy wisdom what it is like with delivery dates.

And the Lord in his wisdom said, Noah, my son, I knowest. Why else dost thou think I have caused a flood to descend upon the Earth?

[ But it must have been all right in the end, because otherwise they could never have made this film]

The Father of the Bride

As the father of the bride I would now like to reply to the best man’s toast and propose the health of the happy couple

This indeed is a proud day for me. I have often dreamed of the moment when Marlene would come to me and say ‘Daddy, I’m in love with George Witherspoon. He’s been promoted to manager of the bank and now he wants my hand in marriage’. As things turned out George Witherspoon married the chief bridesmaid but then you can’t have everything. What we do have is Rodney, and it is with humble pleasure that I welcome him to our family circle. We represent a number of honourable professions in my family. My father is a respected retail tobacconist, my brother is a distinguished solicitor and as you know I have the honour of being the manager of a well-known grocery shop. We have not had a window cleaner in the family before and I sincerely welcome this new blood.

It’s true that Rodney has had some bad luck lately and is temporarily out of employment owing to that unfortunate misunderstanding over Mrs Parkinson’s jewellery. I myself entirely accept his explanation that the brooch and necklace must have fallen into his pocket when he knocked them with his chamois leather. In any event my brother assures me that Rodney has a good chance and that he is likely to get off with a heavy fine, which will be my small wedding present to the happy couple.

They have a fine start in life—a fine home and fine prospects. My Marlene should learn a great deal from living in one room over a plumber’s shop, and of course it will be very handy if they ever think of getting hot water installed. Both Marlene and Rodney know that my house is at their disposal whenever they want a bath, and the sooner Rodney avails himself of the invitation the better.

Now I want to recall a conversation I was having with Rodney’s father in the vestry before the vicar separated us. Rodney’s father reckons that in the heat of the moment I referred to his son as a half-baked twit. Let me assure Rodney’s father that I never speak in the heat of the moment, particularly on such an auspicious day as this. The way I look upon it I am not losing a daughter but gaining a son. In fact I am also gaining a grandson. The credit for that is entirely Rodney’s. He admits it and she admits it and we won’t go into all that again thank you very much Rodney’s mother. I admire Rodney for the way he has stood by my Marlene. When the paternity case came up a lesser man would have skipped his bail. Not Rodney. He came all the way back from holiday in Dublin to face his responsibilities like a man, and also gave myself, my brother and my three sons an opportunity of visiting the great Irish capital.

Finally, before proposing the toast, I have a message from the catering manager about twelve fish-knives and a silver-plated cruet. He says that Rodney’s family will know what he means and that he is prepared to accept it as a joke if the missing items are on the table when we leave. Now I ask you all to charge your glasses, and be upstanding for the happy couple. Marlene—could you help Rodney’s father to his feet, there’s a love. The happy couple.

[Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall]

Sooty of the Yard and Sir Stafford Crisp

It seems a pity to quote hoax entries in Conservapedia, the leading source of misinformation for the not very bright, because this increases the chances that they will be exposed before we have all had a chance to enjoy them. My own contributions, providing fascinating and totally fallacious details about the careers of such characters as Melzach the Jebusite and the modern artist Goswell Frand, were spotted and disappeared within a couple of weeks, and I am now banned from the site; quite right too.

However, the editors of this fatuous website are, typically, Baptist creationist sophomores; they are not the sharpest of reviewers and very unlikely to be readers of Other Men's Flowers, so I will recommend this entry which I came across today; it may have vanished even before I post this piece; in case it has, I reprint it here in full:

Detective Superintendent Sooty
Sooty was a notorious figure in Scotland Yard in the mid sixties, his colleague Sweep made a pun of his name referring to himself as "the new broom of the yard". Brought in to fight corruption within Scotland Yard, they were in fact nothing more than puppets of crime figure Harry Corbett. Their campaign in London sloganed "Let's get busy" was not successful, even for a spell. This was eventually brought to light after the infamous incident concerning Basil Brush, which subsequently led to their downfall.
In 1983, Sooty was charged with the murder of three left-wing agitators belonging to an organisation called the Rainbow Programme—Rod Burton, Jane Tucker and Freddie Marks. It is believed by some that they had become aware of his role in MI5's covert project to oust Harold Wilson from office. However, because no reliable witness could be found willing to testify, Sooty was acquitted. He retired to Bordeaux, where he had family, and died of a coronary thrombosis in 1987.




Sooty and Sweep were indeed the puppets of the much-loved Harry Corbett, who created them for TV in the fifties.



Basil Brush is an 18-inch fox who has been a part of British television culture for nearly 40 years. He was created by illustrator and animator Peter Firmin and actor Ivan Owen in 1963; the latter spent most of his life in a cramped box providing Basil’s voice and actions.

Rainbow was a highly successful children's TV puppet series which ran from 1972 t0 1992. The "left-wing agitators" were actually a popular singing/songwriting trio.

And here’s another, still there the last time I looked:

Milton Keynes
Milton Keynes (1883-1961) was a British economist who worked with Lord Beveridge on his landmark report on social service and also advised Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Crisp, modifying the latter's extreme socialist views, in the 1945-51 Atlee government. In the 1951 dissolution honours he became Lord Keynes of Wolverton.
The 1960s new town in Buckinghamshire is named after him. The town is famous for its use of concrete, (especially its concrete cows), its confusing road system, and its apparent abandonment of all aesthetic considerations in its planning.

Many of the spoof entries in Conservapedia seem to have been inserted by mischievous Englishmen, perhaps because they assume, quite rightly, that the editors are even more profoundly ignorant about England than they are about most of the other topics their website covers. After all, why should a Midwestern fundamentalist know or care that the economist Maynard Keynes died a year before Stafford Cripps became Chancellor, or that the new town was named after the existing village of Milton Keynes, which was in the Domesday book?

The reference to concrete cows might have raised doubts, but in fact this is almost the only accurate statement in the whole article.

Bush spells it out

Get the full SOTU speech and the Democratic response on video HERE.

Cherie Blair arrested on assault charge

During the night, I drafted in my mind what I thought was a fairly convincing extract from a White House Press Office release announcing the shock resignation of George W Bush, with a view to posting it here. In the light of day I realised (a) that it was really rather silly and (b) that no-one would be fooled by it, even for a moment, because readers of Other Men's Flowers do not take any of its content seriously, with good reason.

The best (or at any rate the most convincing) April Fool hoaxes are perpetrated by institutions of the utmost probity: preposterous stories can be convincing if you read them in the dry pages of The Lancet or the Proceedings of the Philological Society. So in 1977 The Guardian’s seven-page Special Report on a group of Indian Ocean islands called San Seriffe (largest ones: Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse, capital: Bodoni, President: Marie-Jesu Pica), enthusiastically supported by advertisers, was an enormous success, with travel agents and airlines making official complaints to the editor about the disruption as customers simply refused to believe that the islands did not exist.

But surely the classic 1st April hoax was the one put out by the BBC in a 1957 Panorama. In those days most of us knew little about pasta so many were intrigued by a short film about the spaghetti harvest in Switzerland. What really made it utterly convincing was that the commentary was by Richard Dimbleby, for disbelieving anything he said would have been like questioning the Word of God. (Sadly, he was not available in 1981 to provide the commentary on the wedding of Diana and Charles, because he had died sixteen years earlier: some people believe that if he had been able to grace the ceremony with his magisterial tones their marriage might have stood a better chance of success.)

The spaghetti film is on the BBC website here, and today David McKie writes in The Guardian with some other stories about All Fools Day.

The Uzzards

You must imagine this spoken at a cocktail party in a gushing voice :

Oh, you live in the North, do you? How super. What fun. You don’t by any chance know the Uzzards? They live in the North somewhere. He’s in some terrific chemical thing up there and she’s hideously pretty. I mean, I hardly know them, but I do remember someone saying that they lived up in that part of the world. You must meet them, they’re frightful sweeties. Well, I say they’re up in the North, but of course at the moment they aren’t because he’s doing … what is he doing? How is it that one can never remember what people are doing? I think he’s doing five years. I think I’m right in saying five. There was some terrible confusion about some money thing he was mixed up with. Such a pity, because he’s such good value. And she’s so madly sensible about it all.

And the absolutely unforgivably ghastly thing is that I’ve forgotten what she’s doing, but I think that what she’s doing is life. There was some kind of dreadful muddle about her au pair getting sort of murdered. Such rotten luck. And of course just when she needed the girl most! Maddening when you get a good one and off she goes. Because the tragic thing was, the girl was an absolute marvel. I think that’s why David got involved in this terrible confusion about the money thing. I think so. There was some ghastly mix-up over sort of fur coats and abortion sort of things. I think that was it. Then Sue heard that David had got involved in this muddle about the money thing and she thought, wow, and she got into this muddle about the murder thing.

So absolutely awful when everyone involved is so awfully nice. And such killingly good value. But you’ve never met them? And now they’re not up in the North any more! How sickening. Such a dreadful waste, somehow. No, I mean of the North. Still, I get the impression it’s frightful fun living up there.

Michael Frayn

Vespers

Whenever the government offers some well-meant and probably sound advice to the public, someone is sure to make a disapproving comment about the Nanny State, forgetting that most nannies were wise and kind. But not all, perhaps:

Little boy kneels at the foot of the bed
Droops on the little hands little gold head
Hush! Hush! Whisper who dare
Christopher Robin is having a swear:
God rot Nanny, I know that’s right
Wasn’t she hell in the bath tonight?
She scrubbed my back with a celluloid duck
O God, let Nanny fall under a truck…

Lies, damned lies, and websites

Many websites are full of inaccurate information. Whether this is because of the authors' laziness, carelessness or ignorance, the regrettable result is that it is impossible to determine which sites are trustworthy and which are not.

However, it is refreshing and heartening to find that there are some sites about which there can be no doubt whatsoever: they consist entirely of falsehoods, having been set up with deceit as their sole purpose. I list below examples of four such misleading sources, three British and one American, which have cast aside all restraints of decency and honour and flagrantly pretend to be something which they are not. I include links to them and brief quotations from their often offensive distortions of the truth.

Be prepared
Official advice
“In an effort to worry the public and convince them to vote for us again next year, and because George Bush asked us to, this website includes the common sense advice found in our Preparing for Emergencies booklet, and information on what the government is doing to protect the country as a whole. (Hint: we're praying really, really hard.)………..”

Information on the Security Services
MI5 exposes itself
“The past decade has seen an enormous shift in the direction of global politics that has in turn caused a radical reassessment of MI5's goals and operational behaviour. This reassessment is now complete, and we've decided to carry on doing things exactly the same way as we did before.
We hope that these pages will give you some insight into the vigorous work done by MI5 to keep Britain in its rightful place as the seventeenth most powerful nation on Earth…….”

Eponym
The story of aluminium (or aluminum)
“A Staffordshire iron-founder named Joshua Aluminium invented in 1844 a process for extracting the metal from bauxite, and it was named after him…….”

The Onion
The daddy of all unreliable newspapers
“BAGHDAD—After 19 months of struggle in Iraq, U.S. military officials conceded a loss to Iraqi insurgents Monday, but said America can be proud of finishing a very strong second…..."

Dear Sir, Our client Mr Arthur Cladgebind...

A little booklet just published called Safe Names (New Writers’ Association, £3.95) will be a boon not only to new writers but to all writers of fiction. The team of compilers (who remain anonymous, asserting that their own names are too humorous to mention), realised that for many authors thinking up names for their characters is a time-wasting chore, and have made up a list of over 15,000 possible names from which writers can choose as many as they need before starting a new novel. Every one is a perfect compromise between the real-sounding but forgettable and the memorable but ridiculous.

More importantly, every one is guaranteed not to belong to any living person. In today’s world, if an author gives a thoroughly nasty character the name of a real person, he or his publishers run a serious risk of that person demanding substantial damages. One can imagine an agent, in the middle of negotiating film rights, tetchily phoning the author: “Look here, old man, this coke-head character you’ve got who gets had up for bigamy in Chapter IV. You’ve called him George Crumshaw. Damn it, there must be hundreds of ‘em and some are sure to sue, can’t you make it Charlie Grapefeather or something?”

Obviously a great deal of research went into the compilation. It would have been no use just dreaming up unlikely names and hoping for the best, because some people’s names really do sound preposterous; I mean, you might think you’d be safe with Nora Barnacle, but James Joyce’s lover was actually called that.

Perhaps in a later edition there will be a section listing names of people who have agreed that, for a fee, characters in a novel who behave splendidly throughout may be named after them. Personally I wouldn’t ask for a fee if some young novelist wanted to use my name for his handsome, tough, brilliantly successful but somehow deeply lovable hero.

Aluminum

This is how they write "aluminium" in North America. An American friend was asking me about this curious misspelling and it seems she had never heard the story of how it came about.

The word is an eponym, of course. A Staffordshire iron-founder named Joshua Aluminium invented in 1844 a process for extracting the metal from bauxite, and it was named after him. (Oddly enough, "bauxite" is also eponymous: a Canadian fur-trader called Jean-Emile Baux was the first man to discover the medicinal uses of the ore, and Baux poultices are still widely used in rural Alberta.)

Joshua patented his invention and during the rest of the nineteenth century he and his sons grew extremely rich from the proceeds; Joshua himself was knighted in 1887. By 1914 his grandson, also called Joshua, owned many thousands of acres in Staffordshire and was elevated to the peerage as the first Viscount Aluminium.

As a captain in the Staffordshire Yeomanry he fought at Mons and suffered serious injury, having half his face blown away by a shell. However, he recovered and emigrated to Canada in 1924 after selling his estate.

Later that year two distinguished members of the Edmonton Golf Club were discussing some of the new players and one of them remarked "Of course, Aluminium's only got one eye...". This was overheard by the club steward who totally misunderstood the context and repeated the comment to his wife, a young teacher at Edmonton High. She thought it meant that the usual spelling of "aluminium" was wrong. and from then on taught all her pupils to leave out the second "i". The new spelling soon caught on in Canada and, like all new Canadian ideas, was quickly taken up throughout the United States.

This is just one of the many fascinating tales which are told and re-told wherever metallurgists foregather. In a later post I shall tell the story of the Sheffield chemist Arthur Stainless, whose new type of steel revolutionised the cutlery trade in the 1890s.

More on aluminium

Staple diet

The increasing sophistication of our tastes in food and the development of such esoteric areas of research as molecular gastronomy sometimes distract us from the high place that simple and homely fare should hold in our affection.
To counterbalance the influence of the likes of Heston Blumenthal, I suggest a revival of interest in an easily prepared dish whose whole charm lies in its simplicity and adaptability. It can be eaten alone, but also provides a steady base for more interesting flavours, and can appear without being incongruous at any of the three meals.

English Toast
Take three or four slices (not too thin) of one day-old white loaf (other ages and colours will do). Taking care not to lose the centres of the slices, place each in turn into a 250-volt 5-amp toaster set at No. 3. Your toaster may be fitted with an automatic setting which will eject the toast when done; if not, you will have to judge by waiting for a wisp of blue smoke to rise (the toast should, by now, be a beautiful golden brown; if it is black, start again). While still hot, remove the crusts with a bread knife, halve, and stack in a special rack. Serve warm with butter. Variations can be introduced by adding such widely contrasting tastes as marmalade or plum and apple jam.

More blessed to receive

For seventeen years I was involved as an official in the organisation of international meetings. I was, I need hardly say, quite immune to any kind of corruption, mainly because the gifts I was offered by foreign delegates when I went overseas were generally not worth paying excess baggage on, let alone being corrupted by. Too late, I realised that I could have rectified this situation by circulating some guidance notes:

Those wishing to offer gifts to senior officials are advised that the following will not be accepted or even acknowledged:
Large heavy books about your country, illustrated with pictures of national monuments and your leader.
Dolls, particularly large ones in glass cases
Anything of vaguely ethnic significance for standing on the mantelpiece
Unidentifiable comestibles in leaking containers
Silly plaques or pennants
In general, alcoholic drinks are undesirable gifts, particularly obscure ones from your own country, in menacing dark-coloured bottles with incomprehensible labels, because no-one would want to use up his duty-free allowance on such things. However, old brandies, rare single malts and fine claret for drinking on the spot are, broadly speaking, acceptable.
The ideal gift is small, light, of high intrinsic value and easily concealed from Customs. Examples are:
Watches (not Russian)
Banknotes (sterling or dollars, used, small denominations)
Jewellery
Top-of-the-range SLR cameras (with extra lenses)
Bear in mind that the fact that you have taken the trouble to carry a gift across the world does not necessarily mean that the recipient will think it of sufficient interest or value to take home with him.
You must understand that no gift offered will, in any way, influence the attitude of officials towards any delegate. However, it is inevitable that a delegate who simply deposits at the offices, with his card, something amusing by Cartier will stand a better chance of obtaining preferential treatment than one who, in person and with halitosis, presents a large mis-shaped wooden object of unknown purpose, and makes a long speech about it. There is no need to ask to see the official personally and to take up his time in this way; if appropriate, he will send a message of thanks at a later date, in all probability.

Father's 'negative' stage

Dr Spock’s Advice To Children is less well known than his other works:

Between the ages of thirty and fifty, father often enters an awkward or “negative” stage. He shows it in a sturdy independence; a reluctance to keep himself occupied in the home with simple fireside tasks like French knitting or silver-polishing; a seeking after the company of young adults – usually of the opposite sex. He begins to practise deceit; he is difficult at mealtimes – pushing away his plate, complaining that the food is cold, or being messy; he comes home late from business and frequently refuses to undress himself before going to bed; he repeats undesirable words that he has heard outside the home.

What attitude should a child take? Scolding the thirty-to-fifty-year-old often makes him more aggressive. If father is of a really independent nature, he may even run away from home.

The child must ask himself: Is father getting enough to drink at home? Acute thirst often accompanies the “awkward” stage. See that there is always a bottle of squash about the house; it is advisable to keep it on a shelf that is on father’s eye-level, so that he need not bend down for it. Many fathers who do not drink enough at home form the habit of accepting drinks from strangers – and this can lead to tummy upsets, irritability and headaches.

Has father enough toys in the house? You may find that if you leave your electric railroad equipment laid out at bedtime (do see that the plugs and switches are of the “safe” kind!), father will enjoy two-train smashes, and may eventually graduate to simple shunting and point-changing. He will damage the equipment, of course, but insistence on his paying for new parts will help to develop a “money sense” in him. Then try leaving your floating toys in the bath, and leave a wiping cloth among them. Once he has exhausted the possibilities of submarines and divers attacking ducks and soap-rafts, father may even wipe away the “tide-mark” on the side of the bath, if he remembers to let the water out.

Encourage father to bring his friends home. You will find that, once he sees them against his family background, he will soon learn to discriminate. He will not ask the naughty ones a second time. Here, again, see that there is plenty to drink. Within reason, let them have a beano - soda-pop, lime juice, or even milk shakes are quite safe in moderation.

Leave all your building bricks on the lounge carpet so that father and his friends can all play together. You will find that eventually they will be fully occupied in building edifices that even children would find difficult.

Finally, ask mother to help you - she may have some other ideas on how to deal with father’s “awkward” stage.

The Horsecroft controversy

Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst are only the latest in a long line of artists whose work has not been appreciated - or even understood - by the public.
There was a notable argument in the sixties about the work of the late Godfrey Horsecroft. By the time of his death in 2001, of course, he had become a respected conventional artist, but in those days he had attracted much opprobrium by his contempt for the art world and his refusal to conform in any way to its conventions. Some of the discussion was carried on in the correspondence pages of the now defunct magazine Art-Horizons, from which these letters are reprinted by permission of the publishers:

Sir, I feel you should give me, as one of the modern artists pilloried in your columns recently, an opportunity to reply.
Of course there is a lunatic fringe to our profession. The lay public’s contempt for the man who produces pictures by riding a bicycle over dollops of paint, and sells them at a hundred guineas a time, is understandable. Personally, I must confess to a sneaking admiration for his acumen, if not for his artistic integrity, but I would not attempt to justify his methods. Cycling and painting are quite separate means of self-expression and their combination is both incongruous and indecorous.
It is unfortunate that this sort of thing leads many people to believe that any means of producing pictures which is not basically the same as that practised by, say, Rubens, is a fraud and a matter for contumely or mirth. It is doubly unfortunate for artists such as myself who, daring to use a medium both new and exciting, have been tarred with the same brush as the charlatans who seek only notoriety.
My own method of creating pictures – the attaching of large, irregularly shaped pieces of newspaper by means of special resins to sheets of anodised aluminium - is, I believe, a very real advance in the techniques of pictorial representation. My experiments with it have shown that it permits, in a way that no other medium does, the expression of psychiatric tones as opposed to mere visual ones.
My Paranoia Recumbent for example, a study in the chiaroscuro of the subconscious, would be completely meaningless in oils or watercolours, but in pieces of newspaper on aluminium it captures the very essence of the subject.
Alas, I am not one of those who profit by their originality. To maintain myself I have been forced to devote a large proportion of my time to menial and ill-paid work, the influence of which may in the long run destroy my very will to create.
But I do not despair. The vituperation and neglect I and the bulk of my fellow modern artists suffer was also the lot of Van Gogh. Now, every suburban villa has its view of Arles. In fifty years’ time, perhaps – who knows? - my own Nature Morte Schizoide will be as popular. In the meantime, we can only bow to the scorn of the multitude, and await the judgment of posterity.
Yours, etc
Godfrey Horsecroft
****
Dear Sir, Mr Horsecroft must be mad if he imagines that the public in fifty years time are going to take him to their hearts as they have Van Gogh.
His letter does not really tell us enough about his method to enable us to judge it properly. These pieces of newspaper that he sticks on to the aluminium, for example. Are they all from different papers or does he, as I suspect, use only the sports pages of the Daily Mirror? And is the aluminium completely covered or does some of it show through? Above all, is not the use of special resins merely an affectation when ordinary glue would serve just as well?
It would be unfair to call Mr Horsecroft a charlatan without a better acquaintance with his work, but I cannot help feeling that his motives in trying to foist it on the public are, to say the least, questionable.
Yours faithfully
Arthur N Ruttmold
****
Dear Sir, Godfrey Horsecroft has generously permitted me to reply on his behalf to the unkind letter from a Mr Ruttmold which you published last week.
Anyone who has sat at the feet of Mr Horsecroft for twelve years, as I have, knows he is not a man to use special resins where ordinary glue would do the job. Has Mr Ruttmold ever tried sticking pieces of newspaper on to aluminium? I can assure him that it is not so easy as it sounds.
As for the gibe about using only the sports pages of the Daily Mirror, Mr Ruttmold might be interested to know that in his latest work, Libido with Mandoline, Horsecroft has used pieces of no less than forty-one provincial weeklies as well as short extracts from all the national dailies. Besides disposing of Mr Ruttmold’s insinuations, this, I think, is a complete answer to the charge of superficiality so often levelled at Horsecroft’s work.
Yours faithfully
Fuchsia Burlap
****
Dear Sir, I see that a lot of people are writing about these pictures made of newspaper stuck on aluminium.
My husband brought one home that Mr Horsecroft had given him for decorating his house, and ever since then our friends have been saying how nice it is and asking where they could get one like it. It is called Autumn Neuroses and my husband says it is the best picture he has ever seen, though you can’t read what it says on some of the pieces of newspaper because the stuff they are stuck on with has come through and stained them a sort of brown colour.
Yours faithfully
A. E. Crimstance (Mrs)
****
The Editor writes:
No further space, unfortunately, can be allotted to the Horsecroft controversy, which has caused as much furore among art-lovers as the violent disagreements a few years back about Wilbert Longbottom’s ceramics.
Note: Mr Horsecroft has asked us to thank all our readers who sent him bundles of old newspapers and pieces of aluminium, and to say that he now has sufficient to last for several years.

Never Before In the History of Motion Pictures

In these turbulent times there is a great deal of comfort to be obtained by watching British films of the forties and fifties on afternoon TV. You know that nothing much will change from one film to the next: the actors playing policemen will be those who always play policemen, and although there will be glimpses of, for example, Thora Hird as a fresh-faced young girl, Alastair Sim will look exactly as he always did. Even the occasional surprise (John Mills as a murderous Nazi, Cottage To Let, 1941) only heightens the general sense of reassuring predictability. American epics of the period had much the same qualities and here is a contemporary review by J Lindsay Kerr of one of them:

A Mr Sol Leventritt, distantly aided by the writers of the Book of Genesis, is responsible for the script of Noah of Ararat. Naturally there is a cast of thousands of animals, but some impressive specimens of homo sapiens, arrayed in togas and nightdresses left over from Quo Vadis, have been provided to help them along.
Noah (Finlay Currie) never amounts to much, pottering about the ark with a bag of nails and an expression of Biblical gloom. But the poor fellow is having trouble with his step-daughter (Deborah Kerr) who prefers strolling on the boatdeck with shipmate Ham (Robert Taylor) to doing the chores for poppa. “Mind the whale,” says Mr Taylor, “remember cousin Jonah.” No wonder Miss Kerr looks startled.
The film is enlivened by the unexpected appearance of Miss Eartha Kitt as the wife of Shem, whose singing of Forty Days – And Forty Nights invests those simple words with a meaning never intended by Genesis 7:17.
Three hours of vulgar, extravagant boredom come to an end when Mr Taylor and his dewy-eyed love finally become man and wife, thanks to the arrival on the scene, several thousand years ahead of schedule, of the prophet Isaiah.

An exercise in futility

Review by William Guipe in West End Weekly:

When Façade was first performed, Edith Sitwell declaimed her poems through a megaphone from behind a screen. In the new production of Istvan Groyer’s Melamine-Faced Chipboard which opened last night at the Alice B Toklas theatre, a clever variation of this arrangement keeps the cast behind a screen but reverses the megaphone: they cannot be heard, but can hear every word spoken in the audience. A further neat twist is that the man who works the lights (or rather, light) is prominently placed and fitted with a lapel microphone, so that as he fumbles incompetently with the console his muttered obscenities resound throughout the auditorium.

   The play is, of course, about incomprehensibility and the total futility of all forms of human intercourse. Nine Bulgarian dyslexics gather together in a disused boot-polish factory and ruminate about their ailments and their relationships. Enmities develop, alliances form and collapse, wild schemes are mooted, argued over and finally abandoned. All this comes across more powerfully than in any previous production of the play I have ever seen, the point – or lack of point – being magically reinforced by the complete invisibility and inaudibility of the actors.

   I was pleased to have the opportunity of seeing this fine piece performed by what may, for all I know, be an excellent cast, and to realise that its previous obscurity (it flopped in Florence and was booed in Budapest) was undeserved.

   I urge you to go and see this play before it closes on Saturday, though you will not find this easy because the Alice B Toklas is very difficult to find even for those who know Hoxton well. If you have to give up the search, you may comfort yourself with the thought that this is just what was intended, a wry comment on the theme of the play: we cannot locate, we do not know why, and trying to find out is, ultimately, futile.

   Groyer always said that he was trying to offer an experience which is totally inaccessible not just to the uncultured but to everyone including intellectuals, thus demonstrating that the idea of any kind of thought or emotion being transmitted from one person to another is a dangerous myth, and that the medium is the message only in the sense that neither has any significance whatsoever.

Character reference

Dear Sirs
ARTHUR PRITCHARD
In reply to your query, I am happy to confirm that I have been acquainted with the above for more than twenty years and am therefore well-placed to know that in Arthur Pritchard an ugly, vicious exterior conceals an ugly, vicious nature.
The nicknames by which his disgusting band of intimates know him – Plugface Pritchard, Arthur the Almost Human, Old Slobberchops and so on – are quite inadequate to describe either the repulsiveness of his personal appearance or the unique bestiality of his character and habits.
I would unhesitatingly recommend Arthur Pritchard for any position for which degeneracy, extreme turpitude, blatant immorality and total disregard of ordinary decent standards are the prime requisites.

Yours faithfully

[I don’t know if he got the job. If it was a senior position at Conservative Central Office, he probably did.]