Pansy Cradledew recently spent three days in rural Denmark. Upon her return, she presented me with some small gifts of Danish stationery. Among these was a pencil, along the barrel of which the following phrases are stamped:
GRAKS AGANAK PIKIPOF
AUTOMOLOK TITA TITO
PLOKS GUGANAGA PLIP
I suspect this is probably gobbledegook rather than Danish, although there is a distinct possibility it might be Real Orghast. If any reader can tell me what it means, please do so in the Comments.
Evidence has come to light that Tiny Enid, the plucky club-footed tot of this parish, may have had more in common with H. P. Lovecraft than a fondness for fascism. I am grateful to OutaSpaceman for bringing to my attention this snap, originally found on something called the “Flickr account” of one Lawrence Jones:
Dear Mr. Key,, writes Poppy Nisbet from her fastness in North America, There was an offer on Freecycle this morning for a “disabled rooster”. I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. It read: “Offer: disabled rooster”.
Likewise, on the bird front, I found a wonderful 17th century engraving of two standing desert ostriches blowing on their eggs. After dogged persistence Google finally produced a translation of the accompanying Latin text and I learned that ostriches were believed to leave their eggs to hatch in the care of the sun and the sand. The parent birds blew “nourishing breathe” onto their offspring before, er, deserting them.
The translation given for ostrich was “Sparrow-camel”.
The other day I mentioned Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. I feel it only right that you should be told Tender Buttons is also the name of a magnificent button shop in New York City. Last year it celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Should you find yourself in that fair city I wholeheartedly recommend you pay it a visit and buy some buttons. I did.
Two more New Yorkers encountered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mr Key has returned from his brief sojourn in New York, and is gathering his wits and resting his weary limbs. Meanwhile, here is a snap of a couple of New Yorkers I encountered (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Coming soon – another New Yorker, the Knight of the Whisks (with whisks)!
I am very grateful to Poppy Nisbet for drawing this to my attention. From this moment on, I shall be magnetizing all my food. I will let you know how things are going in a week or so.
While my brainpans remain empty of words, no doubt temporarily, I must reassure you lot that I am still living and breathing, so here – courtesy of my informant Poppy Nisbet – is a fifteenth century German illustration from the Book of Revelation.
Many thanks to David Thompson for bringing to our attention this letter from the correspondence columns of the Weekly Worker. What a relief to know that David Icke’s sensible insights have been taken on board by the Communist Party Alliance!
I never claimed that the future of humanity “may rest on the beneficence of extra-terrestrial reptiles.” I… referred to the reptilian control theory, which argues that for thousands of years humanity has been controlled by a reptilian race, using their mixed reptile-human genetic bloodlines, who have oppressed and exploited humans, while claiming descent from the ‘gods’ and the divine right to rule by bloodline. Ancient and modern society is obsessed with reptilian, serpent and dragon themes, possibly due to this heritage. Even the flag of Wales has a dragon on it.
Most people have closed minds, depending on the issues. Mention the possibility of aliens secretly manipulating humanity behind the scenes and the shutters come down.
Last night I dreamed I was a passenger in a minibus. I was accompanied by several old friends from years ago and by Quakers. For reasons never explicit, everybody in the minibus thoroughly disapproved of me. My sense of this was vivid and distressing, and I was very glad to wake from it.
I told Pansy Cradledew I had had a bad dream. “I was the subject of disapproval,” I said. She laughed. “When people say they have bad dreams you expect them to say ‘I was terrified’ or something similar. But no, you were merely subject to disapproval.” She found this highly amusing.
Later I was able to reflect that things could be much worse. I learned that Auberon Waugh’s maternal grandfather was told by a foolish friend that a guaranteed cure for blindness was to have all of one’s teeth removed. He arranged for this to be done, contracted blood poisoning as a result, and died at the age of 43.
According to a six-DVD set on the subject of British Birds made by the ornithologist Paul Doherty, the gannet is “the most pointy bird to be found in Britain”.
I am indebted to Andy Martin for bringing this critically important information to my attention. Mr Martin adds: “I wish to pass a motion that the gannet be adopted as the official emblem of Pointy Town, to appear on any heraldic designs, flags, and stationery”. I think we can consider that carried, nem. con.
The gannet : exceedingly pointy
My father was an eminent buttonmaker… but I had a soul above buttons… and panted for a liberal profession.
Sylvester Daggerwood, 1795. My thanks to Poppy Nisbet for this important quotation.
In a comment on Peewit Patrol, yesterday, Dave asks about my use of the phrase “running like the clappers”. The clappers referred to are those of bells, which strike the inner surface of the bell to create that clang we know and love and occasionally stuff cotton wool in our ears to muffle.
If it is argued that the clappers of bells do not run, nor trot, nor scamper, all I can offer in my defence is that the phrase, meaning “to go very fast”, seems to have originated with Royal Air Force public school chaps during the second world war. The OED cites Eric Partridge’s (not Peewit’s, note) A Dictionary of Forces’ Slang 1939-45 (Secker & Warburg 1948). Further citations suggest that it can rain like the clappers, and that one can both surrender and go to work like the clappers, so running towards a spinney for an initiation ceremony in the moonlight seems equally viable.
It should be noted that the bells the clappers of which go so very fast are specified by Partridge (not Peewit) as the bells of hell. It so happens that Dobson, the titanic out of print pamphleteer of the last century, devoted one of his pamphlets to this very subject. Fanatical Hooting Yardists may recall this piece, originally posted five long years ago, in the dying days of the Brown administration:
The bells of hell do not ring, says Theophrastus Dogend, they clank and clunk, eternally, awfully, deafeningly. This is because they are battered and broken, with great cracks and fissures. He adds that they are covered in mould, of stinking greeny-grey.
There are no bells in hell, we are told by Pilupus Taxifor. He says the clanks and clunks are the din of infernal machinery, engines of havoc, designed to torment the damned. If there be stinking mould upon the machines he does not say.
While Optrex Gibbus maintains there are precisely ten thousand bells in hell, each of them numbered, each in its own belfry, and they are rung by sinners, in expiation, the bell-pulls in the form of vipers, which bite the sinners’ hands and wrists each time they peal their designated bell.
Dobson’s pamphlet Hell, Its Bells (out of print) is an attempt to untangle the contradictions in these authorities, each of which, he contends, has at least a grain of truth. Are there bells in hell, he asks, or are there not? If there are, do they ring or do they clank? And clunk? Are there ten thousand bells, or fewer, or more, even an infinity of bells, just as there is an infinity of pits and dungeons and oubliettes in which the damned languish forever?
The pamphleteer’s research for this paper, which he read aloud at a meeting of the Sawdust Bridge Platform Debating Initiative on the tenth of April 1954, led him up some pretty horrible pathways, pathways more abhorrent even than the one that runs parallel to the disgusting canal wherein the vomit of generations has collected. Why it is that drunks and those with stomach disorders have habitually seen fit to throw up their guts in a canal basin at the end of a long and twisting lane far from any clinics and hostelries is a mystery Dobson never investigated, so far as we know. But he was spellbound by the bells of hell, upon which, he believed, so much, so very very much, hinged. It is a pity he never got round to writing the follow-up pamphlet, Hell, Its Bells, And All That Hinges Upon Them, With Lots Of Details, a work which exists only in the form of illegible scribblings in a notebook half of which is burned and the remaining half smeared with a stinking greeny-grey goo, which might be mould scraped from the bells of hell, but might on the other hand just be the sort of goo that Dobson managed to attract to himself, in his wanderings, God knows how.
Hooting Yard Encyclopaedia topics addressed : Hell, bells, goo.