Archive for the 'Prose' Category

You can learn many things by watching the Eurovision Song Contest. I noted some of them the other day at The Dabbler, but here I wish to confess that it was only when watching Eurovision that I learned to pronounce Malmö correctly. I had always thought that the final ö rhymed with dough. Now I know that it is more accurately a sort of er or uh sound.

This new knowledge led me, by ways I will not bother to explain, to devise a plan for an exciting piece of musical theatre. Now, I have not studied the life and times of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi with any great diligence, nor indeed with any diligence at all. What I know of the late tyrant was picked up from news reports – print and broadcast – over the years. So I have no idea whether he ever paid a visit to Sweden. If he did not, it does not matter, for my musical can be wholly fictional.

The basic premise of my all-singing all-dancing show is that Gaddafi, on a visit to Sweden’s southern capital, is presented by the good burghers of Malmö with an offering of myrrh. I realise this has connotations of the baby Jesus being presented with myrrh – plus gold and frankincense – by the three Kings of Orion-Tar, and that as a result my show might be accused of blasphemy. Well, bring it on!, as they say. We are all aware that blasphemy is a splendid way to drum up publicity. And Christian blasphemy is nice and safe, and wins plaudits for being “edgy” from the Guardian, unlike blasphemy against Islam, which gets you blown up or beheaded and accused of being racist by the Guardian.

The main – the only – reason I have devised this show, however, is as a pretext for the title Muammar’s Malmö Myrrh. That has a pleasing ring, does it not? The great thing about it is that, however clearly and resoundingly you try to enunciate the words, you still sound like a toothless inarticulate wretch.

Like Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet, I am beautiful and clean and so very very young. Well, that is not exactly the case. I am unprepossessing, faintly grubby, and middle-aged. But then, Tony Hadley is no spring chicken either, if not quite as old as me. But, all else being equal, and notwithstanding brute reality, and both having my cake and eating it, I think I can justly claim to have beauty and cleanliness and youth, in comparison with certain others. A one hundred year old toad, sitting in a bog, for example. Put me next to that toad – on a dais, so I remain unsullied by bog-filth – and I think you would have to agree that if one of us is beautiful and clean and so very very young, it is certainly not the centenarian toad. We will not invite Tony Hadley into the line-up.

Toads do not feature largely in the Spandau Ballet story. Indeed, they do not feature at all. I have read the literature, all of it, repeatedly, far beyond what is reasonable, and I can tell you there is not a toad to be found anywhere, not in The Spands : Harbingers Of Pop, nor in Ooh Ooh Ooh, This Much Is True, nor in The Spandau Ballet Pop-Up Picture Book, nor in any of the other several dozen volumes under which my bookshelf creaks. This is, I think, a great pity.

Much would be explained were we to learn that the Kemp brothers, or Tony Hadley himself, kept, as a child, a pet toad. (I know there were a couple of other Spands, but nobody remembers who they were, or cares, other than their immediate families.) Ask me to explain what, precisely, would be explained, and I will make a fastidious gesture with my hands, and snort, and arrange my features into a withering look – a look that withers.

Did Googie Withers ever listen to, say, Chant No. 1? It is one of the greatest regrets of my life that I did not grab the opportunity to ask her this question before she died, a couple of years ago, at the age of ninety-four. Not that I had the opportunity. I never met her. But I could have ferreted about for an email address or contact details, and put my query. I feel sure Googie would have replied.

Of course, I have other regrets, many, oh!, many. And in all honesty, it is probably not true to say that the Withers/Chant No. 1 regret is among the most heart-wrenching of them. Not really. When I said it was, I suppose I was just trying to lend myself airs. It’s a common failing, but I shouldn’t make excuses. I know that now. And I know it because I have spent untold hours listening, at top volume, to the point where the neighbours complained to the police, to the entire Spandau Ballet discography, including out-takes and demos, on a loop, while gazing at large high definition hyperrealist pictures of toads, with a magnifying glass. You should try it some time. If there is a better way of clearing one’s head of cobwebs and faff, I don’t know what it is.

When I saw advertisements for the imminent cinema release of Mud, I was bitterly disappointed to learn that this is a brand new film. I had hoped it was a revival of the original Mud, that classic film dun directed by wild-eyed auteur Horst Gack.

The wrong Mud

Gack, of course, invented film dun, and was its greatest practitioner. Unlike film noir, the archetypal film dun is shot entirely in shades of dun. It was Horst Gack’s peculiar genius to recognise that there could be no better subject matter for a film in dun than mud. Thus, in Mud (1937), and its sequel, Further Mud (1957), the camera gazes unflinchingly at patches of mud, wholly dun in colour, without distracting the viewer with poltrooneries such as characters and plot and car chases and big loud fiery explosions.

“Mud is a gripping experience,” wrote the film critic Gervase Cravat in the October 1937 issue of Cravat’s Film Digest magazine, “I, for one, will never look at mud in the same way, ever again.”

He returned to the subject in the following month’s issue.

Last month I wrote that, having seen Horst Gack’s Mud, I would never look at mud in the same way, ever again. It is with a certain humility, then, if not utter self-abasement, that I must admit I have indeed been looking at mud in the same old way as I always did. The very next day after watching Mud, I was taking a stroll in a sordid rustic backwater when I came upon an extensive stretch of mud, dun in hue, and the thought popped into my head “Gosh, what a lot of mud, just like all the other mud I have ever seen in my three score years on earth”, and I pranced on, towards the viaduct and the otter sanctuary, dismissing the mud from my mind. Only when I got home several hours later, and was making a cup of tea, preparatory to putting my feet up and whistling some dance band tunes, did I realise that I had looked at the mud in the old way, as if had never seen Horst Gack’s film. This was highly disconcerting, so much so that I tightened the cravat around my neck, forgot about the cup of tea, and immediately wrote a mea culpa to Gack, confessing that his film had not, after all, had the effect on me I thought it had had, but this was almost certainly my fault rather than his. Knowing that unquestioning worship is the only proper approach to the great auteur, I added that I would atone for my philistinism by returning to the extensive stretch of mud, dun in hue, in the sordid rustic backwater, and mould from it a dun-hued mud effigy of Horst Gack himself, double life-size, before which I would prostrate myself several times a day, in between watching repeat screenings of Mud. This I have done, every day since, and boy oh boy, let me tell you, filmgoers, I am like unto a man transformed.

Hooba Nooba Hoo! Bent Cronje!
He forded the Ack and he slew our foes!
He lopped off their heads and stuck them on spikes!
With his bevelled sword he slew and slew!
Now we carry his bones to their resting-place
In the palace on the hill under a cloud of crows!
But the mighty Bent Cronje will never die!
He is reborn daily as a bird!

This is a translation – and not a very good one – of the so-called Bent Cronje Song, commemorating Bent Cronje, the ancient hero who saved the town of Scroonhoonpooge from attack by the forces of Git, the “King-across-the-Ack”. Its chief interest, for historians, is the mention of the palace on the hill. Where in the name of heaven was this palace? There are no hills anywhere near Scroonhoonpooge. The land thereabouts is flat for as far as the eye can see, and indeed much of it is boggy and marshy and empuddled.

If the site could be located, it would be possible to have a dig, with spades, to see if there are any bones buried there. The presence of bones would not necessarily prove the historical existence of Bent Cronje himself, of course, but it would give scholars something to mull over. As things stand, all we know of Bent Cronje is his song and a shield – much battered and dented and rusty – kept in a glass case in the vestibule of Scroonhoonpooge Almshouse. It is said, according to the hand-written card stuck next to it, to be Bent Cronje’s shield, which he carried with him as he forded the Ack and lopped the heads off Git’s army. The provenance of the adjacent piece of cardboard is dubious, with some claiming it only appeared in the glass case last Thursday. If that is true, Bent Cronje’s shield might be any old scrap of battered and dented and rusty metal dug out of a pit somewhere in the vicinity. It might not even be a shield.

Whereas the historians are stymied until such time as they can find the location of the palace, not so the ornithologists. Unsurprisingly, quite a number of bird experts get in a flap about the idea that Bent Cronje is “reborn daily” as a bird. There are competing theories. One strand of thought is that the soul or essence of Bent Cronje is present in a new hatchling every day, implying that over the centuries untold thousands of birds have actually been Bent Cronje simultaneously. Against this, some argue that there is but a single soul or essence which somehow flits from bird to bird by a process we puny humans cannot hope to comprehend.

There was a fad, a few years ago, for Bent Cronje bird seances. A bird would be trapped and encaged and brought to a darkened room and the cage placed in the centre of a round table, Various spiritually-minded ornithologists would be seated around the table, and they would attempt to elicit from the bird some indication that it was the living embodiment, for that day at least, of the legendary hero. The process usually involved rapping noises, sudden chills in the room temperature, and the spewing of ectoplasm. No definitive Bent Cronje bird was ever identified, which is hardly surprising when one considers the foolishness of such behaviour.

My own view is that someone ought to study very carefully that translation of the song. I suspect it is woefully inaccurate, and that the words Bent and Cronje and Ack and foes and lopped and heads and stuck and spikes and bevelled and sword and slew and bones and resting-place and palace and hill and crows and reborn and daily and bird are all wrong. It would be immeasurably helpful if we knew from what language it has been translated.

Generations of tinies have grown up learning the nursery rhyme with the Roud Folk Song Index number 21143, to wit:

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes.

In a recent earth-shattering research paper, published in The Weekly Earth-Shattering Research Papers Digest, boffins at the Centre For Banbury Cross Studies make a convincing argument that the third line of the rhyme is wrong. Using state of the art techniques involving a big magnetic robot, they claim that it ought to read

Wrinkles on her fingers and boils on her toes.

The lady may indeed be fine, but she is also a crone, or a hag. It is thought that she is related by sisterhood to both the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman and the Woman of Twigs, and Shakespeare probably had the trio in mind when he was writing The Tragedie Of Macbeth.

In a related development, other boffins at a different Centre, for other Studies, have been using state of the art techniques involving a tiny rubber nozzle to identify the music that the lady with wrinkles on her fingers and boils on her toes was listening to wherever she went. Their unarguable case is that the music was some particularly argumentative German improv racket, made with dustbin lids and hammers and hideous electronic buzzing noises.

Together, these two studies shed an entirely new light on the nursery rhyme. It is a light that the present day inhabitants of Banbury Cross find unwelcome, and there have been mutterings in the streets, and dark deeds plotted in the taverns, and pebbles thrown at boffins. Excitingly, the latter hoo-hah has given rise to the creation of a brand new nursery rhyme:

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross
To see all the citizens get very cross
Let’s all throw pebbles at the boffins
Until they end up in their coffins.

Call me slow-witted, if you will, but it took me an extraordinary length of time to realise that the manger, away in which the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head, was in fact a barnyard animal feeding trough. Yes, yes, I know that the carol is quite explicit on this matter, pointing out that the holy infant had “no crib for his bed”, but somehow in my mind I have always associated a manger with a newborn’s sleep facility, rather than as what the OED calls “a long open box or trough in a stable, barn, etc., out of which horses and cattle can eat fodder”. You see what I mean about being slow-witted?

Anyway, what occurs to me are the immense repercussions had some roaming ravenous barnyard omnivore fallen upon the manger and, understandably assuming its contents to be dinner, gobbled up the little Lord Jesus. Two thousand and thirteen years of Christian civilization would have been as naught. Imagine that, if you can.

Though we might further consider the possibility that the barnyard omnivore, having ingested the Messiah, could itself have become the focus of religious yearnings. Let us assume that Joseph and Mary, fine, responsible parents as they were, were distracted by the arrival of shepherds and wise men and kings, and took their eyes off their mewling infant just long enough for the ravenous beast to come clattering into the farmyard building and guzzle the baby down.

Incidentally, just as I was confused about the precise nature of a manger, I was equally muddleheaded about the provenance of the kings. I thought they were “we three kings of Orion-Tar”. I had no idea where Orion-Tar might be – though it sounded vaguely like a region of outer space – nor why it had three kings rather than, as is usual, just the one, unless one is in Westeros, which has several. But the kings of Westeros are continually at each other’s throats, whereas the three kings of Orion-Tar seem like boon companions, travelling together across the desert (or possibly the Red Waste) following a star.

Anyway, if we assume that Joseph and Mary and the shepherds and the Magi and the three kings of Orion-Tar suddenly hear a great gulping and belching sound from the ravenous omnivore, and turn to look, they might very well want to make sure that the beast does not go running off. It might be too late to save the little Lord Almighty, but the barnyard beast itself is now clearly sacred. It contains within it the light of heaven and the hope of all mankind.

Goats are omnivorous, as far as I know, so let us say that it is a goat that has swallowed the baby Jesus. It seems likely that, over the succeeding two thousand and thirteen years, we would have devised a culture based upon a goat-god. How different would our history be? It might be interesting to run the permutations through a superdupercomputer, as long range weather forecasters and climate change persons do. Or, more cheaply, one could create a board game, to while away the starlit evenings, snuggled down in heaps of straw, in barnyards far away.

He was out by the tar pits, as usual, thinking hard about tar, as usual. Tar occupied his thoughts when he went to the tar pits, but the rest of the time he could dismiss it, tar, from his head. He was a carrot-top, and he smelled of fresh-mown grass.

Tar is a product of the destructive distillation of organic substances. It is a highly complex material, varying in its composition according to the nature of the body from which it is distilled, different products, moreover, being obtained according to the temperature at which the process of distillation is carried on. As commercial products there are two principal classes of tar in use – wood tar, the product of the special distillation of several varieties of wood, and coal tar, which is primarily a by-product of the distillation of coal during the manufacture of gas for illuminating purposes.. These tars are intimately related to bitumen, asphalt, mineral pitch and petroleum.

He knew all this, and the more he thought about it, the more his head became tar-filled, almost up to the brim. It was a relief to lollop over to the pier and to board the waiting paddle-steamer, and to chug along the wide important river, all the way home. For a paddle-steamer snack, he had a blood orange in a paper bag.

He leaned on the rail, eating his snack and keeping an eye on the riverbank in hope of spotting an otter. When he was not at the tar pits, thinking about tar, much of his time was spent trying to devise a working otter-scanner. He envisioned some sort of contraption to be worn on his head, with a visor that could be lowered, with viewfinders attached, and a hand-held control panel, with lights and buzzers. Was there a riverbank creature more glorious than the otter? He thought not.

Yet the pull of the tar pits was irresistible. Sometimes, as soon as he disembarked at the pier close to home, he turned tail and reboarded the paddle-steamer and went straight back. Then he thought hard about wood tar. Wood tar, known also as Stockholm and as Archangel tar, is principally prepared in the great pine forests of central and northern Russia, Finland and Sweden. The material chiefly employed is the resinous stools and roots of the Scotch fir and the Siberian larch, with other less common fir-tree roots. A large amount of tar is also prepared from the roots of the swamp pine in North and South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, in the United States. In the distillation of wood a series of products, including gas, tar, pyroligneous acid, acetone, wood spirit and charcoal may be obtained, and any of these may be the primary object of the operation.

He had never been to any of those places, to Russia or Finland or Sweden, to North or South Carolina or Georgia or Alabama in the United States. He had never been anywhere really, save for along the wide important river from his home to the tar pits and back. But he had no Wanderlust. And he was a moral cretin.

A portion of fruit in a paper bag was his favourite snack. He did not care much which fruit. He used the same paper bag day in day out until it was tattered and torn and fell to bits. Then he asked the greengrocer for a fresh paper bag. The greengrocer was a huge beast of a man with a florid face and one withered arm, and he did not give out paper bags willy nilly. But he liked to hear tales of tar.

Wood tar is used in medicine under the name of Fix liquida. Its preparation unguentum picis liquidae is composed of wood tar and yellow beeswax. Externally tar is a valuable stimulating dressing in scaly skin diseases, such as psoriasis and chronic eczema. Internally wood tar is a popular remedy as an expectorant in subacute and chronic bronchitis. It is usually given as tar water, one part of wood tar being stirred into four parts of water and filtered. Given internally tar is likely to upset the digestion; taken in large quantities it causes pain and vomiting and dark urine, symptoms similar to carbolic acid poisoning.

That is what he told the greengrocer when applying for his most recent new paper bag. It was a hot Thursday in August and he had some bright ideas in his head about the otter-scanner. He bought a Carlsbad plum to go in his new paper bag and headed towards the pier. Ah! Sweet mystery of life! At last I’ve found thee. Ah! I know at last the secret of it all! All the longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning, the burning hopes, the joy and idle tears that fall. Tar and otters! Otters and tar!

The “tar” found in tar pits is not actually tar.