The Study of Moths

THE TOP 50 PARASITES TO HOST BEFORE YOU DIE

2011-08-23T03:20:00.000-07:00

As the seasons change over, cultural pundits and commentators alike are all huffing and puffing over what we will be wearing, listening to, doing and constructing in the next few months. You’ll find endless lists in the broadsheets and supplements; sometimes the lists contain 50 items, sometimes 100, but it’s usually a neat round number with some kind of link to the decimal system. You don’t see lists of 33, or 17. I don’t know why. I imagine that numbers not ending in 0 might feel a little marginalised, and I worry that they might turn their backs on the quality press and become aficionados of the Red Tops and Scandal Sheets. When I say I worry, I don’t lose sleep over it, but I do know that 27, for instance, is a very impressionable soul, easily led and given to minor acts of retributive rebellion. I’ll keep an eye on her. I remember the time she almost ran away with an outright bounder from the Binary System, and 45 and I had a hell of a time convincing her that shallow charm in the form of multiple 1s and 0s was no substitute for the solidity and dependability of, say, a good honest Prime Number. (I would give an example here, but I’m not entirely sure I know what a prime number is – I think it might be one that is only divisible by itself and 36).

I’m not just concerned, though, by the neatly rounded numbers that make up these lists, I am also bemused by the ways in which they seek to act as a memento mori. They all encourage one to go and read or look at these 100-odd things ‘BEFORE YOU DIE.’ It’s enough to make you paranoid. Do they know something I don’t? Are the dark circles under my eyes not just the general malaise and weariness of adulthood but an indication of some genetic disorder that means I won’t see another Christmas? Is that twinge in my right knee a creeping canker that will grow and spread throughout my body like ground elder, choking all the good parts of me until only disease and decay is left? (In the case that you know me and quite like me, don’t worry about that – I know I just get a bit of patellar tendonitis in the right knee when I jump about too much and don’t use the Ibuprofen gel enough, I was just using a bit of pretentious hyperbole; however, if you know me and aren’t that keen on me, then I’m sorry, but I don’t really think I’m dangerously ill).

But back to the topic: 100 Books You Must Read Before You Die, 50 Dances You Must Do at a Wedding Disco Before You Die, 100 Spells You Must Cast Before You or Your Familiar Dies, 50 Types of Sushi You Must Encourage Some Other Hapless Soul To Eat Before You Die. Some other hapless soul because sushi is nasty. It’s RAW FISH, but it’s always fun to take other people to a sushi bar and watch their surprised and sometimes alarmed gurning as they try to pretend they like it – and please don’t write to me and tell me you do like sushi, because I just won’t believe you – or, more likely, I’ll smile and say alright, ok, the sushi example was a silly one, I know, I know, lots of people like it; but we’ll both know, really, that that’s a lie, and the next thing is that you’ll be trying to tell me that anchovies aren’t just flattened earthworms and that the Emperor has a lovely new outfit. In any case, eating raw fish is inadvisable as it is frequently riddled with parasites which will swirl around in your innards and start to consume you from the insides out; and wasabi sauce, although it might smell and taste like an acidic industrial disinfectant, will not kill these tiny piscatorial worms that attach themselves to the walls of your intestines in such numbers that your gut will look like velvet under a microscope. Like the very same velvet from which the Emperor’s new jacket is fashioned, in fact. Don’t you watch the Discovery Channel? They show documentaries every week about people whose heads are eaten by grubs that fall from trees in a rainforest, or people who eat the raw flesh of fish and other beasts and become hosts to the most vile nematodes nature has to offer. Ray Mears, too, and people like him, they selflessly try to warn you not to walk barefoot in the woods lest some maggot drill its way into the sole of your foot and slither up your tendons and veins to set up home in your hippocampus, and they tell you about fish worms, day in, day out; you’re not Gollum, you can’t just gulp a still-leaping trout down whole. Watch National Geographic at nine tonight, there’ll be one on. It’ll be listed as ‘Fish Maggots Ate My Soul’ or something. And take note, and never eat sushi yourself. Take a little plate to the sushi bar with you, and put on it a jam tart or a fig roll or something of that ilk, quietly slip it out of your bag when your hapless friend is reaching for the wasabi. No-one will know, because sushi usually looks like a nasty cake or biscuit. And nobody ever got worms from a Garibaldi.

But to go back to the lists and their sinister reminder of your death. I’m not really sure what they’re for. Well, no, that’s not true; they fill up space in the weekend newspapers and give people something to talk about over sushi. You can either feel very smug that you’ve seen 25 of the 50 films that should be seen before you die, or else feel an idiot because the only one you have seen is ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’; then you can feel desperate because out of the 100 Dances to do at Wedding Discos, you’ve not done the birdie one or the ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ (but you have done that Whigfield ‘Saturday Night’ one), and you start to consider your age and your circle of friends and family and you realise that there is no chance at all that you will be invited to another 84 weddings between now and the day you die, and that means that you will have failed and will take your last breath knowing that you are incomplete and unfinished and there is nothing – save spending three years or so crashing the nuptials of strangers – there is nothing you can do about it.

BEFORE YOU DIE. You have to try to cram in all of these things BEFORE YOU DIE. The problem is, although death is perhaps the only certainty in life, its time of arrival is extremely uncertain. Lots of people know or have heard of someone who was given the worst news by the doctor: you only have six months. Trouble is, that was five years ago. And there are all those people on Death Row, whose appeals go on for years and years. So, even those of us who think we have a good idea of our expiry date might be wrong. And that mythical bus that trundles around knocking people over could be hurtling towards any of us right now. You might be served a lethal part of the Fugu Puffer fish in a sushi bar (the ovaries of the female are the most dangerous of all, so always check your portion carefully).

So, my response to the hip broadsheet lists is this: thank you, I have read some of those books and seen some of those films. I might catch a few more of them at some time. I might not bother. I was born into an Irish-Spanish Catholic family and was educated at a Catholic school, and was thus taught that death is not the end. I’m lapsed now, like we all are, but you never know, do you? So what I might do, instead of panicking and feeling culturally inadequate, is that I’ll sit back, finish this cup of wasabi, stuff the Arts section of the weekend broadsheet into the recycling and then maybe I’ll wait till AFTER I DIE to see some of those films. I’ll definitely wait till then to see all the ‘Star Wars’ ones, and even though I have read half of it, I might leave the second half of ‘Ulysses’ for the afterlife too. I’m going to make sure my fleshly remains are both mummified and desiccated fully before I read another Jane Austen. I want even the worms that feasted on me to have been dead for decades before I watch ‘The Matrix’. I’ll have all the time in the world then. I’ll have eternity.

Posh Food

2011-07-18T03:59:00.001-07:00

As a child, I was raised on lumps of grotesquely deformed gristle and gobs of cabbage so watery it had lost all integrity and become a kind of tasteless puree. I bet Cabbage Coulis is now gracing the menu of some fashionably overpriced eatery in one of those big cities you hear so much about on the telly, but back when I was forced to eat it because other children in foreign countries were starving and I ought to be more grateful, it was rubbish. My mother was a bad cook and my father had grown up in a house with five brothers and one sister, so whatever was put on his plate he ate as quickly as he could, always subconsciously fearful that Kathleen or Terry would swipe it from under his nose before he had a proper go at it; he never really noticed how bizarrely vile it was. My mother most frequently made stews, mince and some strange kind of dull yellow mucus cheesey concoction. I remember when she once decided that her menu lacked variety and took to pushing reluctant, quivering blobs of lard into some flour and then rolling out the resulting greyish paste, cutting it into rings to bake on a tin tray and balancing these strange discs on top of whatever it as she had made that day, thus creating a ‘pie’. ‘It’s not stew again, no, it’s a steak pie,’ she would claim. Or else ‘minced beef pie’, ‘cheese pie’ or ‘cabbage puree pie’. To me, it usually looked like some unfortunate Mysterons had crashed and drowned in a lake of vomit.

You might think, then, that when I grew up and went away to a big city to study and have coming of age experiences, that I would be amazed and delighted at the cosmopolitan culinary delights awaiting me, but this was not so. I was fully expecting to have awakened tastebuds I never realised I even had, but what I discovered instead is that a great many of the foodstuffs that people gasp over and pay good money for in restaurants and serve up to their friends at those excruciating soirees and dinner parties you have to go to when you become even a little bit adult are actually just as mad and inedible as my mother’s ‘pies’. I was reminded of this last week when I met up with some former colleagues at an authentic pizzeria in Walsall. They all went a bit eager and excitable when they realised you could have anchovies on your pizza and started hyperventilating and almost having orgasms at the mere thought. I’d never had anchovies before because the childhood gristle experiences turned me vegetarian, but I am fond and foolish and did not want to appear unworldly, so I too feigned excitement and asked for anchovies. I was a little surprised, then, when I was served a vast pizza onto which several little earthworms had squirmed and apparently expired. I imagine that if your nostrils are small enough, you could easily suffocate in a mound of melted cheese and dough. My next thought was that I had been set up by my buddies, and they had told the staff to put rubber joke shop worms on my pizza and that all I had to do was shout out good-humouredly, ‘Aargh, nice one, you had me going there.’ Had it been a joke, I might even have done that, but I would have gone home fuming and put a hex on them all later. However, it soon became clear that these earthworms were the anchovies that had earlier caused such effusiveness, and I then had to spend the evening eating around them and trying to hide them in my side salad, which is probably a more fit resting place for expired nematodes than is congealed cheese.

I also need to make reference to sun-dried tomatoes. I believe they are allegedly sun dried to preserve them or to intensify the flavour, but I still think that the production process is probably more like this: get a friend to consume lots of vinegary wine and olive oil, then ask them to eat tomatoes; some time after swallowing, slap your victim very hard on the back so that a half digested tomato in a slimy, acidic coating is expelled. Catch it in a jar – you don’t want it to touch the floor because that’s unhygienic -and say it’s a Mediterranean delicacy. It’ll look like the fledgling bird viscera your killer moggies leave scattered around the garden in Spring, but people will buy it and say they like it, just as they’ll claim to like finding sultanas floating in their curry, when everyone knows that you put sultanas in cakes and scones and they are for you pudding, not your dinner. Same with apples and grapes in coleslaw and the like. And finally, if tomatoes can be sun dried, then so little balls of green snot. These latter can then be served up or sold as capers.

The Grand National

2011-07-18T03:58:00.001-07:00

With The Grand National bearing down upon us, and Donkey Derby season riding fast on its heels, I’m sure you’re as concerned as I am about how best to use your betting money down the bookie’s. So, on your behalf, I’ve spent the past week hanging round the Russian Tea Rooms, Bungalow 8 and the Betty Ford Clinic asking the top celebs how they choose their winners. Here’s what some of them had to say:

TONY CURTIS: “When I was starring in ‘The Vikings’ with Kirk Douglas, we always used to see what the runes said. You’d be amazed at how often those runes were right! Once we learned how to guess at what the inscrutable scratches on them might mean, me and Kirk were quids in and the beers were on us every night. They were also an invaluable aid to pillaging.”

Pip’s verdict: Tonys right! The runes are indeed generally 100% accurate and you can now buy authentic Norse runes in most branches of W.H. Smith.

ALAN BATES: “In order to make predictions of any kind, I always wrestle naked in front of a roaring fire with a rugged thespian. It helps if he’s hirsute and built like a prop-forward. After a couple of hours, the combination of heat exhaustion and repressed homo-eroticism allows me to see God, and then I just ask Him what’s going to happen.”

Pip’s verdict: Alan could be onto something. If the Almighty is indeed omniscient, then He should at least be able to give tips on the National! However, with the price of fossil fuels rocketing (not to mention the attendant environmental concerns) and most of us having only limited access to homo-erotic literary scenarios, this could be a tricky option. Alright for the heavyweight thespians, but maybe not for us mere mortals!

JACKSON POLLOCK: “Lots of folk think that in my energetic, rhythmic canvases I have concealed secret messages containing the names of all future National winners. They couldn’t be more wrong! Although my art might be inspired by a kind of surrealist automatism, when it comes to having a flutter, I carefully study form and read ‘The Racing Post’ every week. I don’t always win, but if you never bet more than you can afford to lose then there shouldn’t be a problem.”

Pip’s verdict: Sensible advice indeed from the wild man of art. You pay your money and you take your choice.

Use tombolas responsibly. Please note that I do not condone the theft of the little biros from either Ladbroke’s or William Hill’s, although I reckon you should take as many of the tiny pencils as you can from Ikea, as that’s the best wood you’re going to find in the whole store

Hair Fear

2011-07-18T03:57:00.001-07:00

Ever since a disastrous perm left me looking like the long-lost evil twin of Vera Duckworth and had me confined to the house for several months, I have suffered from severe coiffeurophobia, or fear of hairdressers. The mere sight of a bottle of Amami blow wave lotion is enough to send me screaming from the room and, since the early 80s, I have almost exclusively done my own hair with scissors that are designed for cutting the rind off bacon. It’s alright, though, I don’t eat bacon. I did have one lapse in the 90s when I was persuaded to visit a salon and ‘get some layers cut in’. ‘It’s fun,’ I was told, ‘it’s relaxing and a new ’do really perks you up.’ I was misled. It was like a cross between medieval torture and an initiation ceremony for some sinister cult. After having my head jerked backwards into a ceramic font and being doused with scalding water (presumably something akin to baptism), I was forced to cover myself in a billowing black ceremonial robes, wear a bizarre rubberised collar around my neck and stare at my ashen reflection in a mirror for forty minutes whilst being mercilessly interrogated. Was I very busy at work at the moment? Had I been on my holidays yet? Did I like the new Simply Red? If I gave the wrong answers, poisonous acids were squirted in my face and sharp pronged scissors were wielded perilously close to my ears, like in the salon scene from ‘Reservoir Dogs‘. Music seemed to be seeping from the ceiling, at a volume just high enough for the song to be identified but not high enough for it to be listened to properly (just as well, for the compilation used in this dark ritual included tracks from both Sade and Bryan Ferry). Around me, people dressed in black milled to and fro, asking each other for what can only have been other implements of vile torture, such as the ‘heated rollers’, the ‘barrel brush’, and - most terrifying of all - the ‘tongs‘. The ordeal could only end after my head had been pulled to and fro whilst jets of red hot air were blasted at me and I had been forced to commit the most unnatural act known to man - I HAD TO LOOK AT THE BACK AND SIDES OF MY OWN HEAD. How this was achieved, I know not, as I had been made to inhale a mist of mind-altering chemicals before the vision was shown to me. People have since told me that they just do it all with mirrors, but I‘m not sure. There was something evil at work there. When I was finally released, my hair was so stiff and bouffant and my face so frozen in a rictus of stubborn endurance that I could probably have walked into a job doing the weather on a cable channel.

A Lexicon of Pain

2011-07-18T03:56:00.001-07:00

For years now, I’ve trailed doggedly from one end of Tin Pan Alley to the other, touting the score of my rock opera based on the 70s TV series 'The Waltons'. At one time it was rumoured that David Hasselhoff had shown a fleeting interest in the Ike Godsey solo number ‘Freak Out in the General Store’, but it seems now that even that musical gem is unlikely to see the light of day. The Hoff thought it to be ‘not the kind of song that can be adequately performed on a tumbling German wall’. Que sera, as say the pretentious people who like to pepper their sentences with ill-fitting foreign phrases. C’est la vie.

However, I am nothing if not resilient and resourceful, and a new project has recently begun to take shape in my mind, born from personal experience. As I sat in the doctor’s surgery the other day, I heard him ask me, ‘If zero is no pain, and ten is the worst pain you’ve ever felt, at what point on that scale would you place the pain you’re feeling now?’ The question brought to mind the emails I sometimes receive from a cinephile friend, who, aping the pomposity of the broadsheet reviewers, offers me a star rating for every film he sees. I suffer from a kind of latent dyscalculia which prevents me from giving a numerical value to anything, whether it be the latest Fassbinder or a potential oesophageal ulcer. I also failed to see how the holding up of a scorecard could offer the doctor any real insight into my suffering. What if I’m a lily-livered princess who pricks her finger and swoons for a century? Or else an SAS trained hard-knock bitch who would scarcely wince at her own disembowelling? It might even have been easier if he’d asked me to place my suffering on a scale from Wham! to Leonard Cohen, or overcooked aubergine to lightly steamed mange tout, or a nylon shellsuit to a merino wool overcoat. Chickweed to roses, maggots to damselflies. Nevertheless, I prefer to find solutions to problems rather than to moan and wail, and as such I am now in the process of assisting medical professionals worldwide by drafting a definitive ‘Lexicon of Pain’, a guide which will most likely revolutionise the related fields of diagnostics and analgesia and will also provide me with the fortune and recognition that ‘Walton Mountain Rock’ has so miserably failed to do.

Even though this is but a draft, please bear in mind that it is nonetheless under a very stern copyright and that my legal team are waiting are to pounce mightily on gazumpers and plagiarists alike. The questions (hereafter rendered in upper case) represent the voice of the physician (or Sawbones, if you will), whilst the responses (rendered in ordinary lower case) the voice of the patient (hereafter known as the Invalidated).

WHAT COLOUR IS YOUR PAIN?

The exact colour of the flame emerging from the gaping maw of a Bunsen Burner in an underfunded laboratory.

DOES YOUR PAIN HAVE AN ODOUR?

Both sweet and fetid, like the breath of a hyena that has recently feasted on the corpse of a reckless explorer.

DOES YOUR PAIN HAVE A GENDER?

Yes, it is a 1,000 page nineteenth century epistolary novel that deals with the ultimate futility and brutality of love.

I SAID GENDER, NOT GENRE.

Oh, sorry. My pain is female.

CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE APPEARANCE OF THIS FEMALE?

She is thin, verging on skeletal. Her large grey eyes are full of sorrow of which she cannot - or dare not - speak. A lank fringe of pale hair falls over her face as she turns towards you. Her small hands drown in the fraying sleeves of her voluminous cardigan.

AND WHAT IS HER NAME?

Lotte.

WHERE IS SHE FROM?

Probably East Berlin.

HOW DOES SHE SPEND HER DAYS?

In despair, listening to David Hasselhoff sing inferior rock songs from atop a crumbling wall.

I SEE (AT THIS POINT DOCTOR NODS SAGELY AND ADDS TO HIS ALREADY COPIOUS NOTES). LET US TRY MORE. DOES YOUR PAIN HAVE A SOUND?

I believe its song is akin to experimental analogue electronica from the 1950s, or else the sound of ‘Wot?’ by Captain Sensible played on an eternal loop, cutting through the scholarly hush of the Reference Library on a Tuesday morning.

IF YOUR PAIN WERE A LANDSCAPE, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

The rock strewn wasteland on the edge of a decaying town, before it becomes nowhere. Like Stoke or Walsall.

And so it goes.

If there are any health professionals reading this who would like to become part of the Beta Testing Group for my Lexicon of Pain, please do not hesitate to drop me a line. As I have just swallowed a Cocodamol and two Ranitidine, I can be reached at the edge of a pool in midsummer, weeping willows dipping their tresses into the water as dragonflies dart in shafts of shifting sunshine and a lamb with fleece as soft as a cloud made out of feathers walks beside me, bleating angelically

Some Notes Relating to the Excrement of the Canine

2011-07-18T03:53:00.001-07:00

Some Notes Relating to the Excrement of the Canine

I am a very responsible dog owner and I never take my hairy Jack Russell girl out without stuffing my jeans pockets with Asda carrier bags for the collection and storage of any bowel movements she might make. The resulting front denim bulge makes me look like a well-endowed ladyboy, but vanity is of little consequence in such situations. I don’t even moan too much if my finger goes through the flimsy plastic, I simply smile stoically and carry on until we get to the stream by the new flats (the Estate Agent calls them ‘apartments’, but this is the unfashionable North End of Stafford within spitting distance of the Rangers ground, not Los Angeles, so we’ll call them what they are), into the waters of which I then thrust my soiled hand. Sadly, there are dog owners who still let their furry charges leave their faecal matter all over the pavements. I am a woman of some curiosity, though, and I have been making notes and observations about these brown pavement treasures, and have realised two things which, to my knowledge (and I’ve checked Proctowiki) have not yet been recorded.

1. Sometimes you see white dog poos. It is a common misconception that the pallor is due to the bleaching action of sunlight. These ‘whities’ are in fact laid exclusively by poodles and other fluffy, girly dogs.

2. It is not an uncommon sight to see a dog poo on which hairy filaments have begun to sprout. Most people believe this to be some kind of mould growth, encouraged by damp weather; again, this is erroneous. If a dog poo is left out long enough, a new dog will begin to form around it; the hair growth is the onset of this process. It is clearly of some importance, then, that we all remove canine faeces from the streets, lest they become overrun by packs of feral beasts, snarling and fornicating openly. This has already happened in some areas of Stoke.

I’ve also become interested in the measures taken by local councils to discourage the leaving of turds on pavements. In the North West of England, in a charming village which I used to visit, there was a sign on one of the footpaths that read, ‘STOP FOULING’. I thought at first it might be a general piece of advice aimed at Vinny Jones hard-men footballers, but it also bore a crude hieroglyph which, on close inspection, and if you did the out-of-focus ‘Magic Eye’ trick, looked a little like one of those dogs you see on the label of the ‘Black and White’ whisky stuff. I’m not sure that this notice was aptly worded, because it suggests that some degree of initial ‘FOULING’ is acceptable, as long as you ‘STOP’ at some point. Also, if the sign were spotted by a person of an adversarial bent, its aggressive capitalisation and use of the imperative might elicit a, ‘STOP FOULING? STOP FOULING? Oh, I haven’t even STARTED yet, squire,’ kind of response. Either way, the end result is some, or even more, fouling. And we don’t want that; I refer you to point number 2, above.

FEED MINT CRACKNELL TO ME

2011-06-25T10:51:00.001-07:00

Ever since Nick Hornby referred to Rhubarb and Custard sweets in his novel ‘High Fidelity’ (later filmed in the US as ‘The Kids from Fame’), celebrities have been clamouring to have their corporate identities linked to deceased confectionery of the kind mourned over by middle-aged people in pubs across the land. The most successful of these to date has been Griff Rhys Jones, at whose petulant insistence Cadbury have re-launched the Wispa bar and now multi-packs are available everywhere, usually at a slightly higher price than other Cadbury’s multi-packs. I can only assume that Griff must be getting a cut. There are also the Harry Enfield Dime Bars, on sale in all Ikea food stores, stacked between the lingonberry jam and those jars of curled up pickled dead worms they have. These are even available in cake form, though Harry has now opted to use the Welsh spelling and is calling them ‘Daim’.

All of this has started me thinking; not so much about the lost chocolate bars, but more about which celebrities might be the best to endorse them in the event of any revival. I think some of the following might be worth pitching to an agent.

MINT CRACKNELL

Essentially a thick, rippled layer of chocolate wrapped around lethal, mouth slashing shards of minty glass, the advert for this delightful sweet featured the famous ‘Gimme Mint Cracknell and I don’t care’ jingle. Thus, its combination of peril and casual insouciance would be ideally suited to an endorsement from Billy Idol. His curling upper lip is suggestive of the pain inflicted by the flesh-tearing properties of the cracknell, whilst his rebellious reputation - enhanced by the wearing of leather trousers and the falling off motorbikes – shows how much he just ‘don’t care’. I can picture Billy now, singing about his lack of concern to a pounding soft-rock beat as the blood oozes between his teeth with every minty mouthful. And if he won’t do it, there’s always Shaun Ryder.

GOLDEN CUP

It’s something of a national joke now, that the England football team never win any significant trophies, so what better way to give our lads the sweet taste of success than by getting them to sell this now defunct caramel treat. I’m not really that up on football these days, but I have heard of Wayne Rooney and I am aware that he is generally considered to factor heavily in our national disappointment. Thus, he could hold aloft one of these golden, foil-wrapped bars, swaggering triumphantly down any British High Street as the voiceover (by a half cut, blubbing Gazza) intones, ‘Finally, Rooney brings home a Golden Cup.’ He could even be shown to offer it to the lovely Coleen, as long as she wasn’t on a Bikini Diet at time of filming.

SUMMIT

Most people have forgotten this, and quite sensibly too. It was a vile mix of dark chocolate, white gooey nonsense and – most alarmingly of all – glace cherries. The TV commercial was based around the concept of a ‘summit meeting’. Very important looking gentlemen in suits sat around a long table and ate these revolting confections with admirable gravitas. Selling these now would be a challenge, and if there is one boardroom troll who relishes such a thing today, it must surely be Sir Alan Sugar (happily, his surname is also one of the key ingredients of the bar, so maybe something could be made of that too). I imagine, in the remade ad, a gaggle of arrogant, vacuous, soundbyte-peddling post-Thatcherite idiots in Next business suits sitting before the sugary guru, about to be ‘fired’, but rescuing the situation at the last minute by offering Sir Alan a bite of a Summit. He utters the word, ‘You’re...’ angrily and with a sense of impending doom, but as he encounters the first rubbery glace cherry in amongst the spongy white nougat, he softens – like sugar in a hot pan – and ends his sentence by sighing out the word, ‘Hired’ with almost orgasmic bliss. If Sir Alan was too busy, I would probably look at David Brent.

SWISSKIT

At one time we were all happily yodelling about we’d ‘risk it for a Swisskit’. It was advertised by a man, possibly a downhill skier, recklessly plunging after this bar made from bits of regurgitated Alpen stuck together with hair gel and chocolate. Now I do know that Eddie the Eagle Edwards is renowned for hare-brained and pointless Alpine plummets and would seem a likely candidate for the Swisskit relaunch, but I think he has recently featured in another naff ad, and in an effort to make this product appeal to a target demographic of middle-aged fools, I would give first refusal to ‘Top Gear’s’ Richard Hammond. Richard did nearly once behead himself in a quest to go fast, and he didn’t even have some congealed muesli to chase then, so just think what he would be prepared to risk for a Swisskit. Also, in a clever nod to his on-screen nickname, he could roll down the mountain in a giant hamster ball; this would provide a fascinating visual complement to the accumulating snowball around the Swisskit. It would be even better if Jeremy Clarkson was waiting at the bottom of the mountain looking sardonic.

AZTEC

Originally launched as Cadbury’s rival to the ubiquitous (and inferior) Mars Bar, the Aztec’s lifespan was all too brief. The promotional badges bore the legend, ‘Feed Aztecs to Me.’ I think my sister had one. I don’t remember the TV ad, but the Cadbury’s website assures me that it was ‘lavish’ and ‘filmed at a real Aztec temple in Mexico.’ This information wasn’t really helping me to think of an appropriate celebrity to endorse any relaunch, but I then discovered that the Aztec people were ‘famous for their agriculture.’ This made me think of celebrity farmers, though I’m not convinced there are any, so I settled on the nearest alternative and came up with Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall. He does grow stuff and he is famous. He’s especially famous for lobbying Parliament about over-fishing and free-range chickens and organic chard, so for my ad campaign I would want to see him scurrying along the corridors of power after David Cameron, bleating on about bringing back a new ethically produced Aztec. A little like the old Gold Blend series, I can see some potential for these Hugh-David encounters to develop along a will they-won’t they theme and become much anticipated by the viewing public, growing into a mini soap opera sizzling with unresolved sexual tension. I can’t be bothered to plot them all out now, but it could end with Hugh and David sitting on some organic soil feeding Aztecs to each other, as a nod to the old badge catchphrase.

There we have it. Five dead chocolates ripe for re-animation and five exquisitely imagined celebrity endorsements. As I’m now likely to become a top advertising executive and a Yuppie, I’m off to snort some finely powdered Mint Cracknell through a fifty pound note in the toilets at Saatchi and Saatchi.

Ciao.

Thunderbirds are go-ers

2011-06-25T10:50:00.003-07:00

A very long time ago, in the 1980s, before some of you were even a twinkle in the eye of the conceiver, a TV channel in the United Kingdom realised that a Sunday morning television audience was made up of a very specific demographic; at around eleven o’clock comatose students, idlers and wastrels would begin staggering from their stinking pits after a hard night out on the Mirage and Taboo, and would be fit for nothing but lying on a settee, swollen tongues lolling thick and heavy inside mouths gritty as the bottom of a prostitute’s handbag, whilst an idiot’s lantern flickered an array of arresting images in front of their soulless, unseeing eyes. Such zombies would not want to be stimulated by lively political debate or emotionally challenged by complex new drama. Instead, they would most likely want to see something familiar, something from their own simpler pasts, a time when alcohol and lovers were unheard of, something that might remind them of the tight-coiled, shiny spring of potential they once were, as every wasted Sunday, one of and shrinking and finite number, slackened and dulled those coils.

So, sometime in the early to mid 80s, ITV began showing Supermarionation re-runs of Gerry Anderson shows from the 1960s, a time which for some might have meant Jean Shrimpton, sexual liberation and Sergeant Pepper but for my blank generation it was Thunderbirds, Stingray and Captain Scarlet. (They did try a new one in the 80s –Terrahawks – but one of its main characters bore such a disturbing resemblance to Welsh rocker Mike Peters of The Alarm that the National Grid reeled from a tsunami-like reflux of electricity as workshy fools switched off in their thousands).

One of the households I lived in at the time comprised a small army of vaguely louche young women with big hair and smudged eyes, the latter oftimes from tearfulness over a vaguely louche boy from the night before, but more usually from having been too Miraged or Tabood to remove the Rimmel kohl, and anyway it made us look a bit like Chrissie Hynde (we hoped). First one down on a Sunday got to slump on a sofa upholstered in equal part with brown dralon and cat hair; for those who followed soonest, there were armchairs of the same plush fabric, and the louchest and latest of all would have to drag beanbags and duvets from bedrooms and make do with the floor. As is often the case with memory, every Sunday morning of that era has since become rolled together into one mythic ball, and events I imagine happening all on the same day might in fact have been divided by weeks or months. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that our darting, youthful minds, on weekdays intent on Lady Chatterley and the Marabar Caves, became other creatures entirely on a Sunday; part creeping mollusc, squirming slowly around and going nowhere in particular, but also part flitting avian, flicking up and down to play and pick up tiny particles of sustenance here and there. (That, by the way, is not a poncy metaphor, am just referring to the fact that we often ate crisps, sometimes dropped ones that had been crushed into the carpet the night before). And we watched the waxy marionettes of our childhoods moving stiffly around their secret islands and began to see them anew.

It was most likely a combination of taboo mirages caused by spending too long shouting Lawrentian obscenities to the echoes in the stifling blackness of the Marabar Caves, but I can remember clearly being draped inelegantly across the armchair and listening to my housemates extolling the virtues of Scott Tracy, Thunderbird 1. He was so handsome, they said, he had dimples, they could drown in the depths of his eyes, he was so much better than any of the real boyfriends we’d had. I stared at him on the screen, relaxing by the pool in his wallpaper patterned shirt and silky cravat, and all I could see was a vacuous fop who had only one thought in his vinyl head: he was certain, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he was the best-looking Tracy brother. With every smug jerk and flail of his plastic limbs, Scott Tracy sailed along slug-like on the oily oozings of his self-assurance. His narcissism was a force greater than any known outside of the Bible; it parted trees and jetted him down some kind of superlubed kiddy slide, into his starched uniform, into the manly leather seat of his phallic vehicle which then made a vertical thrust into the sky, trailing smoky ejaculations. Off he went to save the world with his eyebrows. He wasn’t my type. ‘The best that can be said about him,’ I told my starry-eyed friends, ‘is that he couldn’t get you pregnant.’

There was, I could concede, something to be said for Virgil. His face had the vague loucheness of the manly dimpled eyebrows, but other than that, it was of an altogether different (and literal) mould to Scott’s. I have often thought that Virgil might have been Harrison Ford before Harrison Ford was. He had a knowing, twinkling smile and eyes with some depths. His vehicle was a gently bulging green affair, capable of carrying other essential rescue machinery in its uterine pod, and its upper side curved lightly like the tiny belly pouch of a seven-week pregnancy. Virgil’s name was even less strident and monosyllabically, desperately masculine, and also suggestive of some classical erudition; and, uterine pods notwithstanding, he would still be incapable of impregnating you.

Alan Tracy of Thunderbird 3 was really just like Scott’s photographic baby blond negative. He rode around in a rocket that was neither as phallic nor as confidently thrusting, and he was gauche and over-eager at social gatherings. He was clearly meant to be charming and encourage a kind of maternal tenderness, but I was both too old and too young for that level of response. The best that I could say for him was that he was certainly as spermless as the rest of them.

Gordon was always the brother who caught my attention the most. His vehicle was probably the most unattractive, a sub-aquatic vomit yellow Reliant Robin that could easily have been liveried with the words, ‘Tracy’s Independent Trading’. With his floppy, sandy hair badly cut and his staccato, nasal utterings, he was Rodney Trotter before Rodney Trotter was. When all the Thunderbirds were parked up together, I imagine Scott arrogantly sneering at the Number 4, for it was neither than phallic nor uterine nor thrusting nor anything. But as a woman, I knew. Gordon, for all his apparent awkwardness, was not afraid of the sub-oceanic deep and and, for a time, I sought out men in real life who had an air of Gordon about them. Sadly, they largely turned out to be more like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. If you think about it, it’s an easy mistake to make.

Number 5 Thunderbird orbited silently and eternally in the existential dark of space, and John Tracy was its transmitting beacon. I wondered if his deep isolation was by choice, but, knowing Jeff Tracy to be a controlling patriarch, manipulating his sons through a bizarre portrait gallery that sparked to life at a push of his weathered finger, I suspect that John had sinned and been banished there, and his secret was the dirty one of which the family never spoke. John was drawn and lined, with an air of resignation. I could only think that maybe he had managed to get someone pregnant. It made a kind of sense. Where else might Joe 90* have come from?

Eventually, Thunderbirds was re-run in its entirety. More supermarionation followed. I realised that the eponymous hero of Captain Scarlet was Lloyd Cole before Lloyd Cole was. I was horrified to realise that Stingray’s Marina was not the beautiful exotic princess that every little girl would love to be, but was in fact an horrific misogynist’s fantasy, a woman of impeccable, doe-eyed gorgeousness who was also – literally - dumb as a stick. I hope to this day that she simply kept her beautiful lips closed to get free candlelit dinners off Troy Tempest. After all, if you’re mute, you can’t offer to pay this time or even go Dutch.

* I am sure it is no accident that if you take the first letter of the word ‘ninety’ and add it to the end of the name ‘Joe’, you have something a little like ‘John’. I rest my case.

Should be read in January

2011-06-25T10:48:00.001-07:00

“After the celebrations of the festive season, many people feel low when going back to work. Professor Cary Cooper from the University of Lancaster has now given a name to such feelings of gloom: acute post-bank holiday depression syndrome.”
I came across the above piece of information on the web wide web the other morn as I sat beneath my Argos SAD lamp, its unflattering bluish glare highlighting my combination skin with its uneven tone and calling forth deep shadows from the stray hairs on each badly plucked eyebrow. My attention caught, I squinted in the inadequate illumination and read on. Professor Gary Cooper continued by offering ‘Tips to beating the blues’. One of them must be idiosyncratic/inappropriate use of prepositions, I thought, but no. Instead, he was making useful suggestions under neatly aligned sub-headings such as Get Physical, Try Something New, Contact a Friend or Relative and Look After Yourself. Chillingly, his final suggestion is Learn to Spot the Signs of Trouble, which signs off with a phone number for the Samaritans. They were numbered, so presumably Professor Cary Grant intends you to try them in order. So, after you’ve torn tendons on a treadmill, spent two hours alone in a church hall because the evening course in Welsh was cancelled and nobody told you, been tormented by cousins who never tire of reminding you that your childhood haircut was an unfeminine lopsided ‘Jimmy Connors’ and then castigated yourself brutally for being unable to derive benefit from these ‘Tips at beating the blues’ (just trying out Professor Jim Carrey’s preposition quirk there), you will presumably have to be talked down from the roof of the Tesco multi-storey car park.
I soon decided that Professor Carrie Fisher’s advice was not for me and I resolved to produce my own. I switched off the SAD lamp, closed down Internet Explorer and clicked on the Microsoft Word icon. My face limned by the unflattering bluish glare of the laptop screen, thus I began.
Tips about beating the blues
By Phillipa Bond, M.A.
1. Use prepositions incorrectly. It’s fun, and all the top academics are doing it.
2. Put on a blue sweater over a yellow shirt and lurk about in Ikea. See how long it takes for someone to mistake you for an employee and enquire as to the location of the Bjornborg stair rods. For extra authenticity, make sure you know where the stair rods are and also try to sell them some lingonberries. Offer them a free gift of a tiny pencil. If they complain about the pencil’s diminutive size, just tell them that all Swedish people have tiny, tiny fingers.
3. Write the outline for a TV show and send it to the BBC. I’m planning on doing this one myself. Shows like ‘Waking the Dead’ and ‘Silent Witness’ are popular despite the stilted dialogue, ludicrous plots and unconvincing characterisation, so I’m going to take this sub-genre (crime stories in which the detectives don’t have to solve the case because the pathologist always does) to a new level. My pathologist is a vaguely stylish fifty-something with a deeper cleft in his chin than any of the current TV pathologists. He has been bitten by a radioactive corpse in a lab accident and has thus developed the power to reanimate the dead. The benefit of this is that the victim can then name the murderer and the case is solved. The address you need for this is ‘New Drama Ideas Outlines (Crime/Corpse Dept.), BBC, London.’ Don’t forget to add ‘England’ to this if you live somewhere overseas, like Wales.
4. Set a new trend. This year, I intend to revive the famous ‘Jimmy Connors’ hairdo, but for women. I will probably also make it slightly lopsided. When this makes me a coiffure icon, my cousins can eat dirt. Bastards.
5. Travel. It broadens the mind, and as most places these days are all a bit disappointing - because, let’s face it, no matter where you go you’re always trapped in the prison of your own consciousness anyway- you’ll appreciate home much more. Yes, Walsall looks great after you’ve spent a weekend in Burnley. (Although if you live somewhere already quite depressing like Telford you’ll have to travel to somewhere really, really bad, even worse than Burnley; in that case, make sure you don’t go somewhere pretty, as it will just really balls up this advice and I’ll have to redraft it. So in that case, avoid Appletreewick or Lyme Regis maybe).

That’s it for now. But remember, January is only a month long and it doesn’t come round all that often. Donkey Derby season is just around the corner. Soon, daffodils will be drooping on municipal traffic islands. The Ikea kitchen sale will end. And the world will no longer be bathed in the soul-sucking alien blue glow of the SAD lamp.

Victoriana

2011-06-25T10:47:00.003-07:00

One morning, as Pipistrella was waking up from anxious dreams, she discovered that in her bed she had been changed into Ike Godsey off The Waltons.

I should almost certainly have been a Victorian. I look better as a daguerrotype, the only plant that thrives in my home is the aspidistra and I am drawn to the pomposity of sunsets and haywains. My favourite colours are puce and olive and I find pattens comfortable. I think sideburns and pocket watches attractive on a man and for reading matter, I most often turn to the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood. If you stay in my company for long enough you will witness me wringing my hands and sobbing into my crinoline the words, 'Gone! Gone! And never called me Mother!' I am also currently in a state that can only be described as miffed having found out not a se'enight past that my wealthy benefactor is in fact a convict with an unlikely surname.

I am so keen to find a way to become Victorian that I can often be found in the garden, banging my head repeatedly against a monkey puzzle tree in the hope of inducing a 'Life on Mars' style timeslip. Sadly, all I have to show for my efforts is a lump on my brow the size of a jet mourning brooch and the creeping realisation that probably only policemen are allowed back in time. However, nought is without its benefits, for the discontent and melancholy I experience when I recall that I am forever stuck in this world of Ikea and cordless phones is in itself satisfyingly Victorian.

My life has even moulded itself into the shape of a nineteenth century novel – (a proper one, not a twenty-first century one set in Victorian times, because they’re always filled with pock-marked toothless prostitutes shouting lewd Cockneyisms down narrow cobbled back alleys awash with piss and cutpurses). I have a name that is not really my own by birth; it would be more Victorian if I was unaware of this, so I strive daily to cast it from my memory. I began life as an infant and have moved in a strict linear chronology towards middle age, encountering on this journey many disappointments. My illusory notions about myself and the society into which I was born have been all but shattered. Sometime in the future I will depart this life, but hopefully not until after the novel has been laid down upon the credenza for the last time, its yellowed pages then trapped in eternal silence between the cracked red leather of its covers.

My father was a loud and strident fellow with oddly coloured eyes, a Dickensian sounding name and a set of quaint Micawberian catchphrases. On summer mornings, he could be found in the garden collecting slugs in a bucket, for he believed their presence in his beloved vegetable patch to be a personal affront. As we breakfasted on Kellogg’s Gruel, he would bring in this bucketful of silently writhing thoughtless creatures and display them proudly, and their primeval form would bring to our minds the ideas of Mr. Darwin, and in our hearts a dark fear would rise as we contemplated the possible godlessness of the universe and the accidental meaninglessness of our own existence therein. My mother was a creature of some beauty and breeding who married beneath her and was silently ostracised from her family for so doing. Oftimes I would spy her in the window seat, a plush covered photograph album open on her knee, sorrowfully scanning images of her tall, handsome, Iberian forebears; and I would see a sigh rise in her bosom as she gazed out across the rows of slug-infested cabbages below and at the huffing, farting carthorse of a man she married as he filled his bucket anew.

I have taken a position as a governess, and I conceal from my employer the shameful facts of my own past (by omitting them from my Curriculum Vitae). If my secrets were known, I would be cast out into the snow to wring my hands in despair and sob out my being to the godless skies. By day, I seek to encourage in my young charges a love of verse and of theatre; by night, I sink into melancholy and write in my journal by the sputtering light of a candle (this takes up a great deal of time as I use a sharpened feather rather than a Bic). I must for the time remain in this world of the copybook and the slate, for the cobbled alleyway and the cackling Cockneyism is not for me. I iron my crinoline, lace my whalebones, don my pattens and make the daily trudge to the top of the haywain as the sunset limns my head in a pompous manner. But, Dear Reader, the future is not yet written.

More aspartame, Vicar?

2011-06-25T10:45:00.001-07:00

And here is the typo that promises to bring me my fortune: I had written ‘Pilates of the Caribbean’. In my confused brain there formed a little blurb that might go with that title if it were a real DVD available on the shelves. It went: ‘Captain Jack Twat leads a motley band of buccaneers through a full body routine designed to lengthen, stretch and tone. Equipment needed: exercise mat, eye patch, pieces of eight. And rum.’

The ideas began to flow like aspartame into a vat of diet cola in the Weight Watchers Factory. All I needed to do was to transpose or mistype letters in existing film titles and a whole new movie would be there for the making. So far I have assembled these intriguing titles. I’ve emailed a few to Hollywood, and, I can tell you, there are producers already champing at the bit to get hold of them.

A Clockwork Grange: in a dystopian, uber-violent society of the indeterminate future, a young man with his eye make-up only partially applied, bizarrely clad in an outfit that is part Mr. Benn, part Geoffrey Boycott, rampages around a lonely moated farmhouse and its adjacent outbuildings raping hens and beating up cattle to the melancholy yet aurally challenging whine of the stylophone.

Currie: when flamboyant 70s Sheffield/Leeds United midfielder Tony Currie is mercilessly teased by the likes of Peter Lorimer and Eddie Gray, he exacts an horrific revenge by using his psionic powers to get a sow to menstruate over them in the Players’ Lounge at Bramall Lane or Elland Road.

Maxi Driver: Robert de Niro cruises New York by night in an Austin Maxi. The cosy, family friendly image of this particular model of car is of great benefit to him in his mission to clean up the somewhat seedy streets.

Ghostbutters: in this version, they don’t use the beams. They just Glasgow kiss those ethereal bastards right into the spectral holding tank. I might need to rethink the finale here, as the effectiveness of the head butt as a weapon against the softly yielding nature of marshmallow is questionable to say the least.

Buddy’s Bong: Chesney Hawkes gets high and later could really go a Pot Noodle.

Citizen Dane: much the same as Citizen Kane, only set in Copenhagen, about an enigmatic media mogul whose last word is ‘Smorgesbord.’ It turns out that he had spent his life being mildly annoyed because the woman in the newspaper office’s canteen put a top half on his sandwich.

Lord of the Files: in a dystopian indeterminate future time, a group of young administrators are stranded in the abandoned offices of an accountancy firm in which the filing system has been allowed to deteriorate badly. There ensues a bitter and increasingly violent contretemps between those young men who wish to establish a traditional alphabetical filing system and those who favour a chronological arrangement based on date of file. The one who wears glasses ends up being pushed into a shredder and dies.

Allen, Allens, Allen3: people who go by the name of Allen terrorise a spaceship manned by hard types in muscle vests who carry big flame throwing guns. At the end, maybe Keith Allen leads them into the lair of the King, and they encounter a giant Dave Allen sitting on a giant stool with a giant cigarette, shouting, "Goodnight, thank you, and may your God go with you," as he chucks acid whisky at them.

Dr. Yo! : a rap Bond movie. Luckily for Bond in his Savile Row made to measure outfits, the eponymous villain has his tracksuit trousers slung so low that he is effectively hobbled, in addition to being weighed down by bling, so 007 wins again. Warning: the film will contain some comedy casual murder and one incidence of cartoon misogyny.

There is more. I have also turned my attentions to television titles. So far, I have a friends reunited comedy about two mismatched Geordie gun dogs (‘Whatever Happened to the Likely Labs?’); Witchfinder General Rav Wilding with his ducking stool at the ready to try the evil hags responsible for two headed calves and crop failures (‘Crimewitch’); style guru Gok Wan giving his inimitable advice about what to wear in a post-apocalyptic future when the radiation sickness is already causing hair loss (‘How to Look Good Nuked’); the redemptive and restorative powers of verse are celebrated in supermarionation as an heroic fraternity of rhymers jets across the globe to rescue people trapped in a variety of subterranean locations using only assonance and vilanelles ('Thunderbards'); and, finally, ‘The Golden Sh*t’, which is perhaps too nasty to describe here but would feature a target and some very unpleasant ammunition. Left a bit…

Aspartame - Accidental Discovery

2011-06-25T10:43:00.000-07:00

Imagine this: you’re working away in a laboratory, feverishly trying to invent a new anti-ulcer drug. You’re probably going to get wrong off your bosses if that new anti-ulcer drug candidate formula isn’t on their desks by tomorrow. You’ve been burning the Bunsen at both ends to get the project finished, and this is beginning to tell: you are slurring your speech, unable to complete a sentence without inserting a badly judged and inappropriate humorous aside, or pointless and uninteresting anecdote (I do that when I’m wide awake, to be fair, but I’m not a scientist) and your motor skills are also deteriorating (meaning that you wouldn’t be able to change a spark plug or recalibrate the alternator in a Vauxhall Viva). Sloppiness abounds (wasn’t that a punk band? No, that was Splodgeness now I come to think about it) and you’re doing all sorts of things a scientist should never do. You’ve used the agar as an adhesive and have stuck a couple of Petri dishes over your nipples; the asbestos mat is plonked over your genitals like the fig leaf on a Michelangelo and now you’re dancing around to some appropriate music (maybe We Are Scientists, Thomas Dolby’s ‘She Blinded me with Science’ or Tom Verlaine’s The Scientist Writes a Letter - only you couldn’t write a letter, leastways not a very coherent one, and you’d better not even try while you’re in this state, specially not on the G.D. Searle and Co. headed paper), and your arms are flailing, whirring, rotating like the Seaward Medical Lab Blender 400 (that you have most likely broken by this point). Inevitably, you stumble on the Erlenmeyer flask that you unwittingly knocked to the floor earlier. It shatters beneath your weight and wicked shards of Erlenmeyer penetrate your sole. Your arm reaches out wildly for the nearest support, you manage to grip the edge of the bench, haul yourself up, and, as you do, your fingertips wriggle forwards and you feel something gritty beneath them. Even though you are near deranged with panic and insomnia (and foot pain from the Erlenmeyer), you yet maintain that overwhelming recklessness and curiosity that made you choose Science as your infuriatingly beautiful mistress, and, once you have got yourself upright and adjusted the asbestos mat to preserve your modesty, you tentatively worm your dry, cracked tongue towards your finger and take an experimental taste, like a TV cop in a drugs bust.

It’s sweet. Very sweet.

Yes, it’s 1965*, you are James M. Schlatter and you have just accidentally discovered Aspartame, the lo-cal artificial sweetener du jour. It will eventually find its way into all Weight Watcher’s products, even savoury ones**, and will be responsible for the little moue of displeasure on every dieter’s lips as they realise that with the sweetness comes the bitter aftermath, just like in a love affair.

I recently made a similar fortuitous accidental discovery, which I think could well compensate for the crushing failure of all my previous entrepreneurial and creative efforts. I was typing an email to a cinephile friend and I made a basic typo. I hit a wrong key (I have spatulate digits); and there was this phrase dancing on the screen, and I realised – this is it. This is how I can move forwards. My future lies this way. And other badly written clichéd sounding nonsense.

I will tell more of this soon (striving for enigmatic, just sounding like I can’t be bothered to type anymore). Or feel free to email should you require further information.

* I am aware of the anachronisms in this text. Aspartame, accidentally discovered in 1965; New York based indie pop group We Are Scientists were formed in 2000; Thomas Dolby’s ‘She Blinded Me With Science’ is from 1983; Tom Verlaine’s heart rending (and I’m being serious for once) ‘The Scientist Writes a Letter’ appeared on his 1987 album ‘Flash Light’, and is on my mp3 player, followed by Martin Jarvis reading from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ – Martin does that bit about, ‘My dust would hear her and beat/Had I lain for a century dead’ so beautifully that I often cry like Gazza after a failed World Cup match. Of course James M. Schlatter couldn’t have been dancing to any of those, I know that. I was just having a laugh. He was probably bumping and grinding to 1962’s ‘The Monster Mash’ – you know, that one that starts, ‘I was working in the lab late one night’. That’d fit.

** This probably isn’t true.