As witness the performer who, for many years now, has been exhibiting in the streets of London, the tools of his craft being a bag of large-sized raw potatoes. The man is beyond middle age, and his head is bald, or nearly so; and all over his cranium, from the forehead to the base of his skull, are bumps unknown to the phrenologist. There are blue bumps, and bumps of a faded greenish hue, and bumps red and inflamed, and his bald sconce looks as though it had been out in a rain of spent bullets. It is not so, however; it has only been exposed to a downpour of raw potatoes.

Read more about this magnificent potato man at The Cat’s Meat Shop.

Following on from the potted sketches of our national character by Brit and Wartime Housewife, let us turn to Norman Davies. It is far too long since I have posted extracts from his magnificent pamphlet Further Science : Book 20 (2001), which I introduced to readers way back in January 2004, and quoted further in February 2004 and July 2005. Here then, exactly as it appears in the pamphlet, is Davies on “British Psychology”:

1.  That Country Inventions etc., reveal innate area psychology.

2. Cornwall – informal golden frills / harvest festival / nudist beach / carol service.

3. Devon opposite formal garden frills – orange code guildhall / use of Wedding March.

4. Somerset – soft dreamy colour squares – coloured glass / soft cheese / child pub – contrasts with Gloucester – dream formaIity – bowling green / Sunday School.

5. Dorset / Hants have formal round hotel / bowls / sea cave.

6. Sussex – complex old explosive – loves fireworks / gas lighting / Town Women’s Guild / antiques / Brighton sex.

7. Kent is the odd formal – Council lottery / Waltzing Matilda – in contrast to Essex odd informal – Peculiar People / Dunmow Flitch / heated armchair / hair FC colours.

8. London small family segments – Bingo / one parent families. Middx small clappers – squash etc.

9. Berks – small rounds – Table tennis / Job Centre and Oxford – mass of small items – Oxfam / marmalade / Hand ball / Post Office.

10. Herts / Northants noisy organised complex units – digital computer / go kart / map / CB Radio / speedway.

11. Norfolk – fish finger / dead static oblong, opposite to Leicester lively circles / motor mower / cycling / drive in store.

12. Notts – larger rounds – Sports centre / football / sugar / Spot ball / Boots.

13. Derby – muck frenzy – bakers / disposable nappy / mice racing.

14. Cheshire – murky prying – neighbourhood watch / women’s pubs.

15. Lancs – of mass smooth silky moving little bits – Co-op / small claims Court / NSPCC / Music Hall / athletes club / test tube baby / Police panda cars and radios / computer / nurses strike etc.

16. Yorks – slow rough organised bits – Rugby League / Con man / high rise flats / Building Society / tortoise Olympics / old folk bus / smoke free zone / Marks and Spencer.

17. Durham etc. – thin tube lively bits – electric lamp Fallopian tube transplant / whippet / turbine / keep fit etc.

I have received a bat-letter from Miss Dimity Cashew.

Dear Mr Key, she writes, Like most people, I have always believed that the hideous bat god Fatso is the most terrifying of all bat deities. This has been an article of faith for as long as I can remember. However, I recently stumbled upon Wayne Ferrebee’s blog Ferrebeekeeper, where I discovered some rather alarming details about Camazotz, the Death Bat. Now, while I am no expert on bat deities and their varying levels of hideousness, violence, and terror, it seems to me that Camazotz would prove a formidable opponent were he and the hideous bat god Fatso pitted against each other in some kind of apocalyptic clash of bat deities. Your views on the likely outcome of such a battle would be much appreciated, also of course the betting odds, in case I fancied taking a flutter.

Yours primly, Dimity Cashew (Miss)

PS – I enclose a snapshot of Camazotz from Mr Ferrebee’s blog, so you can appreciate just how terrifying he is. The bat god I mean, not Mr Ferrebee, obviously.

Rather than bashing out an impromptu reply, I think I shall need to embark upon some serious bat god research before jumping to any conclusions. Watch this space.

Last year, I drew to your attention Brit’s capsule history of Britain, 1939-2010, in seventy-seven words. Now another indefatigable blogger, the esteemed Wartime Housewife, has managed to sum up the history of England in just seven words:

England wasn’t built on glamour and competence.

If tinies were still taught anything approaching history in their Self-Esteem Workshop Community Hubs, that would make a perfect essay title. Discuss.

Here is the score of Cornelius Cardew’s 1971 piece 10,000 Nails In The Coffin Of Imperialism. (Click on the image for a slightly larger view.) Note particularly that “yeah!” at the end.

Cardew submitted the piece for publication in the magazine Aspen, but it was rejected by the editor, American composer Tom Johnson, for being “just too out of keeping with the issue as a whole”. How different the world might be, forty years later, if the piece had been published! All over the world, proletarians would have pored over the latest issue of Aspen in their millions, seized on the revolutionary implications of Cardew’s score, and begun the inevitable historical process of driving those ten thousand nails into the coffin of imperialism, thus ushering in a bright new Maoist Utopia of political re-education camps and mass famine, where “workers would machine-gun bosses into bloody pits”, in the words of a poem in praise of Cardew’s political mentor Hardial Bains. Er… yeah!

This afternoon I am going to a concert by the mighty Bohman Brothers. What better way to prepare oneself than by watching this clip from 2002 (which is around the time, inexplicably, that I last witnessed them in action)?

Another thrilling sphairistike-related picture from the London Library:

From the London Library

After a break, I have returned to John Tilbury’s mammoth biography of Cornelius Cardew. It is 1966; Cardew is swanning about in Buffalo, New York while back in London his wife Stella struggles with four children and virtually no money in their top-floor flat off Warwick Road. She writes a stream of letters to Cardew complaining bitterly about the couple who have come to stay at the flat. They add to both her childcare responsibilities, leaving her to act as nursemaid to their pneumonia-wracked child while they go off gallivanting to swish parties, and to her financial problems, in that they never contribute a penny towards the housekeeping – this in spite (or more likely because) of what Stella describes as their exaggerated and unseemly preoccupation with money. She is desperate to get rid of them, but all her efforts fail until eventually Cardew writes a letter ordering them to leave.

And the names of these charming guests? The man is Tony Cox, and the woman is his then wife, a Japanese artist called Yoko Ono.

I have never been worried with the wish or ambition to be a head hunter in the Dyak sense, but on this one occasion I did wish that it had been possible, without violating any law, or doing anything to a fellow-creature which I should not like done to myself, to have obtained possession of this man’s head, with its set of unique and terrible teeth…

When I coveted possession of that head it was not because I thought that it might lead to any fresh discovery. A lower motive inspired the feeling. I wished for it only that I might bring it over the sea, to drop it like a new apple of discord… inscribed, of course, “to the most learned”, but giving no locality and no particulars.

W H Hudson, The Naturalist In La Plata (1892)

A further snippet from Sober Truth : A Collection Of Nineteenth-Century Episodes, Fantastic, Grotesque And Mysterious compiled and edited by Margaret Barton and Osbert Sitwell (1930) reveals that the hunt for Jack the Ripper was a scene from Edward Gorey:

Whitechapel bristled with policemen, whose work was rendered infinitely more difficult by the swarms of amateur detectives from the West End. Medical students and newspaper reporters paraded the streets unconvincingly disguised as women, and in every corner there lurked assassin-hunters in tennis shoes or galoshes.

The Times, February 16, 1855

Considerable sensation has been evoked in the towns of Topsham, Lympstone, Exmouth, Teignmouth, and Dawlish, in the south of Devon, in consequence of the discovery of a vast number of foot-tracks of a most strange and mysterious description. The superstitious go so far as to believe they are the marks of Satan himself; and that great excitement has been produced among all classes may be judged from the fact that the subject has been descanted on from the pulpit.

It appears that on Thursday night last there was a very heavy fall of snow in the neighbourhood of Exeter and the south of Devon. On the following morning, the inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the tracks of some strange and mysterious animal, endowed with the power of ubiquity, as the foot-prints were to be seen in all kinds of inaccessible places – on the tops of houses and narrow walls, in gardens and courtyards enclosed by high walls and palings, as well as in open fields. There was hardly a garden in Lympstone where the foot-prints were not observed.

The track appeared more like that of a biped than a quadruped, and the steps were generally eight inches in advance of each other. The impressions of the feet closely resembled that of a donkey’s shoe, and measured from an inch and a half to (in some instances) two and a half inches across. Here and there it appeared as if cloven, but in the generality of the steps the shoe was continuous, and, from the snow in the centre remaining entire, merely showing the outer crest of the foot, it must have been convex*.

The creature seems to have approached the doors of several houses and then to have retreated, but no one has been able to discover the standing or resting point of this mysterious visitor. On Sunday last the Rev. Mr. Musgrave alluded to the subject in his sermon, and suggested the possibility of the foot-prints being those of a kangaroo; but this could scarcely have been the case, as they were found on both sides of the estuary of the Exe.

At present it remains a mystery, and many superstitious people in the above towns are actually afraid to go outside their doors after night.

* Read concave.

Quoted in Sober Truth : A Collection Of Nineteenth-Century Episodes, Fantastic, Grotesque And Mysterious compiled and edited by Margaret Barton and Osbert Sitwell (1930)

Here is a splendid video of Germander Speedwell, wandering among mosses and naming names in her inimitable style.

Further details at Futility Closet

Apart from her antipathy to bananas as “a very common fruit indeed”, her intense devotion to Aberdeen granite as a divinely-ordained medium for tombstones and memorials, and her devotion to the particular Queen under whom she lived, she was, in other respects, just as true to the reign of Anne or Elizabeth as to that of Victoria; a Shakespearian character, a nurse of all time. Although, perhaps, she belonged to the age of Webster more than to any later one, for there was a certain quality about her at once robust and morbid. She loved the sea, and all its smaller fruits, shrimps, prawns, and winkles (here her aristocratic prejudices, as evinced in her horror of bananas, broke down); she loved the lanes, then fuller of wild flowers than of charabancs, and could name any flower, bird, or tree with its proper English name; she loved theatres and any form of pageantry; but more, I think, than anything, did she love to read of a murder – though it was only in the Bible – visit a friend dying of some lingering disease, or roam at her ease in a well-ordered cemetery, observing every inscribed and floral detail… it was this woman, with her “invincible ignorance”, as those responsible for the welfare of the present writer termed it… together with the old house in the shelter of which he lived, that nevertheless joined everyday life for him on to that of previous ages, prevented the nineteenth century from cutting itself off entirely from the past, and provided a healthy current of red blood to that which otherwise might have seemed a dull, bloated, yet anemic age.

Osbert Sitwell, in the preface to Sober Truth : A Collection Of Nineteenth-Century Episodes, Fantastic, Grotesque And Mysterious, compiled and edited by Margaret Barton and Osbert Sitwell (1930)