Yesterday I posted Outa_Spaceman’s psychic cream tea photograph, along with some questions. Within an hour, this little gem popped into my postbox:

Hello,

I am Cassandra Marquez and I am the PR representative for Juliette de Sousa, World Famous Psychic.

Psychic Juliette de Sousa is now available on Keen and is offer you free minutes

We would also like to know if you would be interested in networking with Juliette through her website and promotional materials.

Please Visit psychicJuliette.com for details.

Have a Beautiful Day!

Cassandra Marques

I would have been impressed had it arrived before I posted the photo.

There are cream teas, and then there are… psychic cream teas.

I have questions.

1. Is the cream tea a mere addendum to the psychic reading?

2. Or is the cream tea itself imbued with psychic woohoohoodiwoo?

3. Does one partake of the cream tea and become psychic?

4. If so, for how long do the effects last?

5. Why is that squiggly graphic shoved so far off-centre?

6. Was this psychic cream tea available at the same countryside fair as Robert Fripp’s legendary “Toyah” cake sale?

Many thanks to Outa_Spaceman for providing me with this important snap.

More from Phil Baker’s biography of Austin Osman Spare, one of the chief pleasures of which is its plethora of anecdotes and asides. Such as this:

In the 1960s Ted Hughes and Peter Brook attempted to develop a language called Orghast, effectively a magical language where words would have “a more inevitable relationship to reality”. For example, the Orghast for “darkness opens its womb” (“staple of any phrasebook” as a cynic writes) is BULLORGA OMBOLOM FROR.

I would like to learn and become fluent in Orghast. Apparently it has a vocabulary of some two thousand words, but of these only about fifty count as “real Orghast”, according to Ted Hughes, and he should know. I wonder what the Orghast is for “By ‘eck, Sylvia, when you first kissed me you drew blood”.

I hope, when I have mastered the fifty magic words, that I do not have the dismissive attitude of Rayner Heppenstall towards another invented language

I had never thought highly of Esperanto (my father had once tried to make me learn it, but when I found the word for bird was ‘birdo’ I could no longer take it seriously).

If the press notices [of Austin Osman Spare’s first West End gallery show] were calculated to put many visitors off, there was something about them that would prove positively attractive to a few. Among them was the so-called Wickedest Man in the World, the self-styled Beast 666; and so it was that Aleister Crowley came striding through the door of number 13 Bruton Street, grandly announcing himself to the shy and awkward artist as the “Vicegerent of God upon Earth”… Spare thought he looked more like “an Italian ponce out of work”, or so he told a friend years later. Perhaps with the benefit of four decades of hindsight, he said this was what he had told Crowley at the time.

From Austin Osman Spare : The Life And Legend Of London’s Lost Artist by Phil Baker (2011)

There are many details to savour in the story of the Bavarian cow fugitive, not the least of which is that the cow is named Yvonne and her sister is Waltraut. Clearly the dairy farmers of Bavaria have a grasp of cow nomenclature second to none. I am also fascinated by Franziska Matti, the Swiss “animal communication expert” who is in telepathic communication with Yvonne, and says:

I spoke to her yesterday and she said that she was fine but didn’t feel ready to come out of hiding. She said she knew that Ernst had been waiting for her but that she was scared. She said she thought that humans would lock her up and she would no longer be free.

I would be greatly interested to learn in what language Ms Matti and Yvonne speak to each other. Does Ms Matti moo, or does the telepathic realm grant Yvonne a smattering of German? Also, with all of Bavaria seemingly agog with the thrill of the hunt, intent either on rescuing Yvonne or shooting her down, how could Ms Matti be sure that the cow with which she was in mystic mental contact was actually Yvonne, and not, say, Waltraut, or Ernst, or any of thousands of other Bavarian dairy cows? If she remained in her fastness in Switzerland while sending out telepathic signals, her ability to pinpoint Yvonne is truly remarkable. One wishes, however, that Ms Matti had asked the simple question, “Whereabouts are you, Yvonne?” With an answer to that, we could be sure that we were hearing from Yvonne herself and not from some telepathic impostor cow intent on muddying the waters, with a motive either benign or, more likely, malign.

I suppose telepathic communication with cows knows no national boundaries, but I do wonder how much work comes Ms Matti’s way. Do dairy farmers throughout Europe come a-hammering at her door whenever one of their cows goes astray? And is she able to use her powers to speak to other farmyard animals, such as goats or hens or pigs? What about non-farmyard animals, giraffes, for example, ostriches, ants, and axolotls? Does she speak to these in their own tongue, for want of a better word, or can they all speak telepathic German?

There is much left unsaid in the newspaper report, so I may have to fire off a letter to Franziska Matti, or, better yet, attempt to communicate with her over the mystic aether. I shall do my best to make my thoughts heard over the telepathic hubbub of mooing and bellowing and cooing and grunting of her other communicants.

Another essential book now online at the The Public Domain Review

Alpacas neatly disposed upon grass in Warwickshire, last Saturday. Snap (a tad larger if clicked upon) by Miss Dimity Cashew, who shortly afterwards bought an enormous amount of freshly-sheared alpaca wool, which she intends to spin and then knit into a garment. But what kind of garment?

Robert Robinson, 1927-2011

“He genuinely placed too much importance on the value of words as meaningful and disinterested tools of thought and wisdom to accept money for delivering even a sincere favourable opinion of sausages or toilet paper.” – Obituary here.

In the age of barbarism, we have become sadly used to the sight of misspelled signage. Oh, how we hark back to the days of traditionally manufactured metal pavement utility covers, made with craft and care… unless, of course, we are in Dunchurch, a village in Warwickshire.

Snap by Miss Dimity Cashew, VI.VIII.MMXI

Life belts An excellent and cheap life belt, for persons proceeding to sea, bathing in dangerous places, or learning to swim, may be thus made: take a yard and three-quarters of strong jean, double, and divide into nine compartments. Let there be a space of two inches after each third compartment. Fill the compartments with very fine cuttings of cork, which may be made by cutting up old corks, or (better still) purchased at the corkcutters’. Work eyelet holes at the bottom of each compartment, to let the water drain out. Attach a neckband and waist strings of stout bootweb and sew them on strongly.

Invaluable advice from Grandmother’s Household Hints, As Good Today As Yesterday by Helen Lyon Adamson (1963). I bought this yesterday in a charity shop, and find myself ready not only to make my own life belt but to remove sweat-stains from hatbands, use hay in my kitchen, deal quickly and effectively with fainting, hysterics, apparent death from drunkenness, and nails growing into the flesh, make baked custard cabbage and stewed watercress, understand the significance of clouds, inflict sure death on insect pests, and iron bobbinet laces.

“The man who sneers at me for admiring, as I do, a well-cut peacock, may take my assurance in advance that I will neither kick him nor abuse him; but pity him I must.” – Shirley Hibberd, the epigraph to The Book Of Topiary, which you can, and must, read in its entirety at the excellent Public Domain Review.

When I was telling you how to make a life-size wolf out of marzipan, I pointed out that it made a splendid teatime treat for both one’s extended family and for smaller kinship grouplets. This prompted a letter from Miss Dimity Cashew, who chided me for excluding those poor lonely souls who have neither. Curiously, she picked as an example the Grunty Man, that monster of children’s nightmares who lurks alone in his horrible cave, without a Mrs Grunty or anyone else to share his grunty depravities and/or delights. I say “curiously”, because quite why one would want to present the Grunty Man with a marzipan wolf, or with any other kind of gift, unless it be an offering to assuage his grunty depredations, is a moot point.

Anyway, I tossed Miss Cashew’s letter into my bakelite “pending” hub and thought no more about it. But now, correspondence from a different correspondent raises the issue of whether in fact the Grunty Man does have some kind of family ties.

Dear Mr. Key, writes Tabitha Brown, I am writing to you concerning two legendary bogeypersons, first the Grunty Man, and second Mrs Grundy, about whom Emily Post wrote in her Blue Book of Social Usage, at least in the earlier editions (as the more recent incarnations of the manual regrettably make no mention of her). Apart from having similar names and delighting in the destruction of the young, are these two characters related in any way? I eagerly await your response, which I hope will prove to be edifying. Thank you for your consideration upon this matter.

Ms Brown helpfully enclosed some snapshots, which I reproduce below, and which can be enlarged to gigantic proportions by clicking on them.

I have not yet been able to do all the research necessary to provide a definitive answer to the question. However, the fact that Emily Post’s Mrs Grundy has a pet magpie and a pet jackal is telling. The Grunty Man, too, is known to keep pets, among which may or may not be a magpie and a jackal. Nobody has ever dared enter his horrible cave to carry out an inventory of such beasts as he keeps as pets, and he rarely allows them out of the foetid gloom. Clearly there is more work to be done on this important subject. In the meantime, it seems that Miss Dimity Cashew can put her mind at rest, albeit tentatively, regarding the Grunty Man’s possession of kith and kin.

Dear Mr Key, writes Rob Howard, I recently spotted this vehicle parked in a charming village on the Cornish coast. Could it be that, far from being out of print, the Dobson canon continues to perform handsomely and that some secret illegitimate is pocketing the royalties? I think, as they tend to say, we should be told.

Many thanks to Ptak Science Books for bringing to our attention this cover from Science Fiction magazine, an issue containing what I feel sure is a masterpiece of storytelling by Stanton A Coblentz.