One of the few photographs ever taken of the Blister Lane Bypass. From The GEC Research Laboratories 1919-1984 by Sir Robert Clayton and Joan Algar (Peter Peregrinus, 1989). Many thanks to Linda Clare for bringing it to my attention.

Hats off to Greg Ross at the ever-intriguing Futility Closet for these selected entries from the index to the Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey:

Aldermen not necessarily gluttons
Anecdotes, on eating peas with a knife
Bed, early retirement to, of the Ancients
Christenings, Royal, often hurried
Coffee, atrocious in England
Cookery, English, the rudest of barbarous devices
Devonshire men good-looking
Fleas in Greece
Greece, Ancient, its people a nation of swindlers
Horses, weeping
Johnson, Dr, at dinner, an indecent spectacle
Leibnitz, died partly from the fear of not being murdered
Lisbon earthquake and its effect on the religion of Germany
Muffins, eating, a cause of suicide
Music, English obtuseness to good
Pig-grunting, mimicry of
Rhinoceros, first sale of a
Servants, England the paradise of household
Solon, what did he do for Homer?
Spitting, art of
Talk, too much in the world
Toothache, that terrific curse
Waterton’s adventure with a crocodile
Women, can die grandly

NOTA BENE : You can read what De Quincey had to say about that muffins / suicide hoo-ha here.

From The Expositor, or Many Mysteries Unravelled – including that of the Learned Pig (1805), available online at The Public Domain Review. My thanks to Richard Carter.

What is this cat listening to on the radio? There will be a prize for the first correct answer received.

Here at Hooting Yard we hate and despise A. A. Milne and all his works. Dorothy Parker had it right when, in her “Constant Reader” column in the New Yorker, she wrote,

And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

Nevertheless, I am delighted to learn that the “Pooh” part of the name Winnie-the-Pooh was originally attached to a swan, Pooh being the name Milne’s son Christopher Robin gave to a swan he befriended in Angmering in Suffolk. If I did not have more important things to do with my time, I might go through the entire awful canon and rewrite the stories, making Winnie-the-Pooh a savage and violent swan instead of an allegedly cute bear. Volume I : Winnie-the-Pooh Attacks Tim Henman And Breaks His Arm.

I missed this story in the papers. Today I learned that

A man sought by police investigating the theft of a fish tank from a furniture shop in Leeds hid in a bush and was attacked by a swarm of wasps.

According to a story in the “Funny Old World” column in the current issue of Private Eye, road signs in Wales are “mistranslated into Welsh on an enormously regular basis”. The example given is of a sign at a roundabout between Penarth and Cardiff. The English Cyclists dismount is given in Welsh as Llid y bledren dymchwelyd, or Bladder disease has returned.

Hitler-worshipping English aristocrat Unity Mitford’s middle name was Valkyrie. She was conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, where her father was prospecting for gold.

Ruthie Bosch (who designed the cover of By Aerostat To Hooting Yard) is in regular receipt, from a Canadian correspondent, of Victorian newspaper and magazine clippings. These are primarily illustrations, but bits and scraps of surrounding text are often still attached. Ruthie tells me that one recent acquisition included the splendid phrase

Now as I belong to a “decayed”, though not yet phosphorescent family

I think I ought to do something with that.

A letter from Johnny Leavesley in The Spectator explains

the old distinction between a sport and a game. A sport is something a gentleman can do while smoking. Hence fishing, shooting and even golf are sports, but foopball and tennis are games

According to a new biography, Dusty Springfield would order deliveries of boxes of crockery, which she would then smash against a wall in a frenzy of hysterical destruction.

Dear Mr Key, writes a correspondent I have just made up, I know you are a constant reader who always has “a book on the go”, as they say. It would interest me to know how you go about choosing which book you are going to read next.

In the normal course of things, I would be hard put to give a straightforward answer to that question. Like most of us, I suspect, I alight upon books for all manner of different reasons, not always rational. Today, however, I can say definitively that I decided on my current reading simply because I saw a photograph in the newspaper of Michael Gove reading it.

When he was sacked as Education Secretary the other week, the Grauniad had a double-page spread on Gove, much of which was of course devoted to attacking him. Among the accompanying photos was one of Gove “at a literary festival”, where he was shown reading from – the title was clearly visible – The Lost World of British Communism by Raphael Samuel, essays written in the 1980s but published in book form (by Verso) in 2006.

I immediately wanted to read this book, and eventually got round to borrowing it from the library. Just a few pages in, and it looks very promising. In the preface by Samuel’s widow Alison Light, I learn that among the treats in store are such details as

what Communists sang or watched at the cinema; what they wore, (open-necked shirts, if they were men, with a pen or pencil prominently displayed in the breast pocket; jumper, slacks and ‘sensible shoes’ if they were women); how Party members comported themselves in public (they were urged to be neat and clean); where they went on holiday – if indeed they took holidays – preferring ‘bracing walks’ in bleak settings; the content and feel of their homes, which were usually uncomfortable, with a small shrine of books and the garden left a wilderness, the author tells us, for want of ‘personal time’.

I shall report further snippets of interest as I read on. Meanwhile, if any readers are able to provide further photographs of Michael Gove reading particular books, I will be very grateful.

I don’t believe any one of you would like to live in a room with a murdered man in the cupboard, however well preserved chemically:- even with a sunflower growing out at the top of a head.

John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Vol. II, August 1871

A couple of nights ago I had a dream in which the protagonist was Lucas Sudja. I had – and have – absolutely no idea who Mr Sudja is, or was, and so, with my finger pressed firmly on the 21st century vacuum o’ vapidity – sorry, I mean zeitgeist – I took to Facecloth to find out.

I was amused by those replies where my respondents shared their own dreams, but more pertinent to this post was Marina Organ’s question whether I had Googled Lucas Sudja, and my reply. It was only when the question was put to me that I thought about the possibility of GoogleNod – a vast archive cataloguing all that is contained, not in the “real” world, but in the world of dreams.

The content of GoogleNod would of course be utterly different to the stuff we find on its parent search engine. Utterly different, but somehow, tangentially, familiar. Lucas Sudja would be there, along with the tribunal of Henry Cow-baiting Irish Maoists, indie band The Fresco Runes, Dave Brock’s handmade wardrobe, and a myriad of other shimmering phantasms from the Land of Nod.

GoogleNod would simply collect the material, certainly make no attempt to “interpret” it. That fool’s errand can be left to the man Vladimir Nabokov called “the Viennese quack” and his increasingly preposterous acolytes. It matters not what Lucas Sudja portends. What matters – if any of it matters at all – is that he now exists, however faint and fugitive, because I dreamed him.

In my post yesterday on Christina the Astonishing, I said that I would be doing further research. In the Comments, Mary O’Grady helpfully led me to the entry on this orphaned Belgian peasant in Butler’s Lives Of The Saints, and I have also been consulting any number of Catholic websites. Those of you who do not have time to devote to such devotional devotion, and would prefer the simpler option of watching a brief video, are referred to Busted Halo (“an online magazine for spiritual seekers”) where you can watch an episode of my new favourite show, Father Steve’s Spooky Saints. Dig that crazy Catholic animation, daddy-o!

Saint Christina the Astonishing sitting in a tree to escape the stench of sin