In 1970, the historian John Julius Norwich began producing 24-page anthologies of trivia, texts, sayings and poetry as Christmas presents for friends. Later, they were published, which is how the likes of me started to get hold of them.
Thanks to him, I know this 11th century poem by Su Dongpo by heart.
It’s come in handy in 2020.
I mention JJN as an attempt to explain what follows. I have stolen his idea, but made it my own. The 2nd Viscount Norwich’s Christmas Crackers were not noted for their childishness and stupidity, for example.
I have remedied this.
INTRODUCTORY DRONING
God, I miss pubs. Especially now. Warmth, light, and conviviality while winter rages outside. Wooden floors, three-legged tables. And pints. Foaming, glorious pints.
I miss saying “Shall we go to the pub?” and my oldest, closest friend saying “For one?”
I miss The Lamb and the Chandos and the Clock House and the unsightly Gun Barrels in Selly Oak (of not very blessed memory) and the Odd One Out in Colchester and the Bell Inn, Walberswick, and all those pubs whose names I never even knew let alone forgot those summers in Edinburgh.
I miss th– Oh, you silly fucker. You don’t miss pubs. You miss being 25.
Well, never mind. Let’s look at the silliest pub that ever there was.
This is The Windsock in Dunstable. Or at least it was. It went up in 1969 and came down again — impractical to run — in 1984, but as the great architecture critic Ian Nairn said, “the designer has had quite considerable fun”.
“When I first saw this,” he said (in the first episode of Nairn Across Britain in 1972), “I thought it was a church with those two great rocking roofs.” Some structures take themselves too seriously, he suggests, “but this is just having a lark, and a good thing, too … There should be far more buildings like this.”
Thanks to a man called Geoff Quincy, you can now read a full history of The Windsock. And due to the bounty of the BBC, you can still watch Nairn Across Britain, which is rather wonderful if you want to see someone enthusing about buildings and canals and landscape, and railing against philistinism. (“The Germans couldn’t have done it. The town planners have”, he says of Stockport.)
I watched it again this year. It boasts this rather wonderful end title:
Still, although the Windsock is sadly missed, it’s not always a bad thing when supposed adornments to our civic centres vanish. The toppling and hurling into the harbour of Bristol’s Edward Colston statue was not just one of the most viscerally thrilling incidents of the year (although 7 November was pretty good, too), it also illustrated the empirical truth that statues are crap and sculpture is better. To adapt the wisdom of Ian Nairn: there should be more Weird Stuff on our streets, and less statuary that doesn’t even look like the undeserving wankers it seeks to glorify.
There is the argument that we should put up statues to good people, but (a) human beings are complicated, and (b) who decides who’s good? So: sculpture. (Apart from anything else, no-one who’s heard of De Akkers metro station can dispute the usefulness of public art any more.)
I don’t think there should be too many prescriptive rules, though. There’s nothing wrong with figurative work, as long as it’s not dull. But if we were to draw up a few… guidelines, I think one of them should be a plea for more in the way of deeply unsettling bronze children. And so, we come to…
A RATHER UNSAVOURY BIT
I took this picture in Bergen a few years ago, where, to the best of my recollection, there is nowhere any explanation for it. In the same vein, this is Angry Boy at the Frogner Park, Oslo, which I heard about for the first time this year.
Norway is clearly a good spot for bizarre public art — indeed, Scandinavia in general if Bad Bad Boy by Tommi Toijas is anything to go by. Here he is, pissing into Helsinki harbour.
Wouldn’t you rather look at something as freakish and upsetting as that than at the world’s most famous urinating statue, the Mannekin Pis? That tiresome, cutesy and, above all, unfunny little prick is surely enough to make even the most ardent Europhile (such as myself) utter the words “bloody Brussels”.
The thought of statues with their cocks out, however, does remind me of something else I learned in 2020. During WWII, the Accademia Gallery in Florence built a brick cocoon around Michelangelo’s David to protect it from bomb damage — and, as a designer called David Rudnick pointed out on Twitter, “accidentally created an even more abiding monument to the overbearing presence of the male form in the western canon than Michelangelo’s David”.
I can’t help being reminded of the monument to the potato in the village of Besiekierz in Poland.
You may speculate among yourselves as to why.
But back to urine for a moment. Jeremy Noel-Tod, Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia, discovered a monograph in January, entitled A.U.D.s An Intimate Study of a Minor Architectural Feature.
It concerns anti-urination devices in Norwich.
When Norwich Station opened in 1844, the city and its market became a popular destination. Unfortunately, public toilets in Britain only really got going with the Great Exhibition of 1851, and only became common in Norwich in the 1890s. This leaves us with a gap, which became filled with piss. There was even a report for the General Board of Health by Inspector W Lee in 1951, which spoke of “urine corners, very offensive places”. Some sort of interim measure was required, and the obvious answer was “quadrantal brick or concrete features fitted into the angles of … buildings”.
What with Norwich having 30 medieval churches — and their nooks, crannies, and alleyways providing perfect natural cover for the full of bladder — there are a great many ecclesiastical anti-urination devices there.
These two are on St Andrew’s Church, “attached to tower buttresses protruding into Bridewell Alley.”
So, if you’ve ever idly wandered around a cathedral precinct and idly wondered what that-rounded-bit-which-doesn’t-quite-look-like-it-belongs-there is — it’s not part of the original architecture, it’s an AUD.
The more astute among you will have noticed that these devices have been exclusively designed with gentlemen in mind. Funny, that.
Still, rather like the old myth about the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 not prohibiting lesbianism because Queen Victoria didn’t believe in it, the 19th century’s failure to consider anyone but men (and how marvellous it is to live in more enlightened times) had its advantages for women.
Presumably a caught-short lady in crinoline could hunker down behind a gravestone and find quiet happiness there.
Anyway, here ends THE RATHER UNSAVOURY BIT. We must turn to more serious matters.
MORE SERIOUS MATTERS
One of the points of these silly witterings is to celebrate people who are far better at telling a story than I am, so please allow me to commend unto you:
The House on Vesper Sands, by Paraic O’Donnell, which contains this almost Wodehousian description:
…Sweeney’s voice was not an instrument of levity. It might have been produced by an injured bull that had been flung into a well.
…and Melmoth, by Sarah Perry, in which one of her characters
…recalls, with a little quickening of the heart, herself as a child, as a teenager, certain that she was in some way marked out — feeling, as the young so often do, that she could not possibly be as ordinary as she seemed.
Isn’t that perfectly observed? But, obviously, being 50, decidedly ordinary, and given to pondering a lost youth makes one consider the accidents of life that take us in one direction or another. Which was one of the things I liked most about Andrew Miller’s excellent Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, and this sentence from it:
Even the most sensible people, he thought, have an edge of lunacy to them, like fat on a cutlet.
(One of the ways I have found contentment in life is by embracing my layer(s) of fat.)
I came late to the His Dark Materials trilogy, so only in 2020 did I read this, from Northern Lights:
Many good liars have no imagination at all; it’s that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
But that’s too much of a reminder of the state of the world, isn’t it? Let’s focus instead on Lissa Evans’ Old Baggage, one of the most sheerly enjoyable things I read this year. When there are too many people in public life whose charm is of
the gimcrack variety, that coat of gilding over a cheap material
let us hope for a future in which (a) there are more women in politics like her opinionated, flawed, and joyous protagonist Mattie Simpkins, and (b) the men are more like her brother, whose charm
seemed woven into his very substance. To put it simply, one had wanted to be with him.
On the subject of charm, another thing I read this year was an account of the night Cary Grant went to an Alice Cooper concert in the 1970s. which I suppose makes this a new section called something like
HOLLYWODD
The story seems to have been told in his girlfriend Maureen Donaldson’s book, An Affair to Remember: My Life with Cary Grant, but I confess, I haven’t checked.
I will say that Cary did his best. He wore earplugs [and, apparently not wanting to be recognised, sunglasses, a gold chain, a checked jacket, and snakeskin trousers] and sat through the entire show without one word of complaint. He sat through the ‘beheading’ and the contortions with the snake and the rest. Driving back to Los Angeles, [I asked him,] ‘You really hated it, didn’t you?’ ‘It’s…’ he said, struggling for words, ‘Remember I told you about the time I took LSD in my doctor’s office and shat all over his rug and floor?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well now I know how that poor doctor felt.’
Somehow, I also managed to leave it until this year to read a story from a man called Michael Dignum, who originally posted it the day David Bowie died in 2016. He’d worked with Bowie, and taken the opportunity to ask The Dame what was the biggest moment in his career. The reply concerned the making of the Ashes to Ashes video.
We’re on the beach shooting this scene … I start singing and walking, but as soon as I do this old geezer with an old dog walks right between me and the camera … I sat… waiting for him to pass … The director said, ‘Excuse me, mister, do you know who this is?’ The old guy looks at me from bottom to top, looks back to the director and says, ‘Of course I do! It’s some cunt in a clown suit.’ That was a huge moment for me. It put me back in my place and made me realise: Yes, I’m just a cunt in a clown suit. I think about that old guy all the time.
We return to the 1970s for the tale — from Leslie Brody’s Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford — of Jean Genet meeting Jane Fonda at a party in Los Angeles and discovering that she spoke French. He woke up the following day, with no idea where he was, in a house where no-one could understand him, but he knew who to call. Fonda told him to go outside and describe the swimming pool, which he did. “You’re at Donald Sutherland’s,” she said. “I’ll be right over.”
Jessica Mitford, incidentally, did not go the way of her sisters Diana and Unity and become a fan of Hitler’s. (Perhaps, if we believed in nominative determinism, we might feel that Unity’s middle name, Valkyrie, was a clue to the direction she would take in life.) No, the second youngest Mitford sister was a member of the American Communist Party for a time, and later the singer for a cowbell and kazoo orchestra called Decca and the Dectones. They were once the support act for Cyndi Lauper, and recorded a cover version of Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.
The Mitford sister I’d most like to emulate, though, was Nancy, who used to send out a card in response to any correspondence which was not considered worthy of any other reply:
(I’m reminded of Herman Melville’s character Bartleby, who responded to all requests to carry out his work with the words “I would prefer not to.”)
But let us return to the matter of
for one more ancient tale of misbehaving celebrities (which somehow makes into a review of 2020 simply by virtue of the fact that some idiot read about it several decades late). This time, it’s an intoxicated Lee Marvin in an excerpt from John Boorman’s Adventures of a Suburban Boy:
We had arrived together in Lee’s Chrysler station wagon. He was staggering drunk. I begged him to let me drive. “Fuck you.” He drew back a fist. He had a whole repertoire of violent gestures, many of them cribbed from his hero, Toshiro Mifune. I tried to grab the keys, but he slashed me with his imaginary samurai sword. These were movie blows. The stopped an inch short of your neck or chin. I snatched the keys and got into the driver’s seat, the women in the back. “Get in, Lee.” Another battle of wills. How could he meekly submit, this warrior, this conqueror? We pleaded with him. He stalked and staggered round the car, raining blows on it. Finally he found a way of saving face. He climbed up and crouched on the roof rack. Despite our entreaties, he would not come down. I decided to drive slowly down the pier, hoping that the cool ocean air might sober him up. I stopped as we got to the public road. I got out. He snarled at me, would not get down. I was at my wits’ end. The streets were deserted. I drove slowly down the Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu. Flashing lights in my rear-view mirror — sirens. I pulled over. The patrolman approached the car, warily loosening his revolver holster. He looked up, then at me. “Do you know you have Lee Marvin on your roof?
If there’s anything I like more than a bit of celebrity eccentricity, though, it’s a comedy animal, so when something comes along that covers both fields…
One of the silliest stories I’ve read this year concerns the Hungarian sheepdog who was nominated for an Oscar. Apparently, Robert ‘Chinatown’ Towne hated the final cut of Greystoke so much, he asked for his name to be taken off it and replaced with that of his faithful hound.
Why the hell he called his dog P H Vazak is anyone’s guess, but said beast was nominated for best adapted screenplay. Sadly, 1985 was the year of Amadeus, so we shall never know how Towne and the Academy might have handled it. Still, top marks to the Wikipedia editor who came up with: “Vazak became the first dog nominated for an Oscar for screenwriting, but he did not fetch the award.”
So, would you like to see the world’s smallest man dancing with his cat?
I think you would, you know.
This is, or was, Henry Behrens outside his house in Worthing in 1956. Lindsey Fitzharris posted it on Twitter in March 2020, suggesting “we all need this right now”, and I think she was right. (She actually posted the b/w Getty original, but I like this colourised one.)
Anyway, we must turn to
MORE SERIOUS MATTERS II
…because I am, in fact, a very sensible and high-minded person. In April, for example, I read a piece by music writer Richard Bratby in the Spectator:
As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his back garden. Napoleon’s armies were closing on Vienna, and Haydn’s suburban home was in the line of fire. His valet recorded that the bedroom door blew open and every window in the house rattled. Shaking violently, the 77-year-old composer’s first thought was for his household, which at that point comprised six servants and a talking parrot who addressed him as ‘Papa’. ‘Children, don’t be afraid, for where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you,’ he shouted.
His central thesis was that Haydn was generous and warm, and that his personality infuses his music.
Mozart converses with angels. Beethoven storms the heavens. But Haydn pours out a big glass of Tokaj and invites you in for a really good chat.
which reminded me of Martin Amis’ idea of the writer as a host, used in this year’s Inside Story, and in a 1999 speech about Nabokov:
Nabokov … is the dream host, always giving us on our visits his best chair and his best wine. [James] Joyce … would call out vaguely from the kitchen, asking you to wait a couple of hours for the final fermentation of a home-brewed punch made out of grenadine, conger eels and sheep dip.
Well, it rings true to me. So I listened to a bit of the old Franz Joseph, and it turns out that he does, indeed, lift the spirits rather more than, for example, Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. (The latter premiered in 1941, which I think, together with that title, might be described as a clue.)
Similarly, while some people chose to mark 2020 by re-watching films called Contagion or Outbreak, some of us decided that The Musketeers on iPlayer was a better bet.
And I maintain that I was right. Well-organised people with something resembling an actual government behind them, successfully overcoming viral unpleasantness? Well, (a) why do you want to be reminded of [gestures at everything]? and (b) surely, you’d spend the whole time rolling your eyes at the concept of a functioning government — especially one which entrusted the task of fighting disease to people who were In Their Depth. The Musketeers, by contrast, concerns absurdly beautiful people buckling swash in escapist ahistorical nonsense. I mean, come on.
PURPLE PATCH
Speaking of beautiful people and escapism, have you ever idly googled ‘Prince Christmas decorations’? Well, I recommend it. This one popped up on Twitter one day this year.
It reminded me of the famous Thin Lizzy Christmas decoration craze of 1974. (Shut up, already. Damn.)
You might also try ‘Queen Russian dolls’, but then you might never sleep again.
Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying that I read a brilliant piece about Prince in the London Review of Books, in which the author splendidly confessed:
When I first saw the Purple Rain movie in 1984, I thought: what a disaster, this will surely sink him. I was, of course, 100 per cent wrong.
Ian Penman, who wrote the article, goes on:
It was a classic example of an audience going crazy for something they had no idea they wanted until it was sitting right in front of them.
Which I thought was a nice observation about creativity and culture: it’s good to be surprised sometimes. (It also echoes William Goldman’s observation about the movie industry: Nobody Knows Anything.) So, this year, I bought Penman’s book, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, about
a vanished moment in musical history when cultures collided.
There’s a chapter on Elvis Presley in which he introduced me to the word horripilation: the erection of hairs on the skin due to cold, fear or excitement. Presley once told a celebrity hairstylist who was (well, of course) his spiritual guide at the time:
‘I don’t want to perform any more. I want to leave the world. Find me a monastery. I want to become a monk.’ But his ascetic mood soon passed (as every Elvis mood passed, each brief and delicious horripilation)…
Of course, one of the reasons this nonsense you’re reading exists is because of my brief and delicious horripilations, but in my defence, I’ve never put in an order to my personal jeweller for:
two hundred wrist watches that flashed both cross of Jesus and star of David.
(Penman also mentions
Elvis’ great grandfather, Dunnan Presley Jr … a two-time Civil War deserter. When he had to fill out a form for a government pension, he wrote: I depend upon myself and do the best I can, which is bad.
And, frankly, which of us can’t say that occasionally?)
WELCOME TO HELL, BLOFELD
In other celebrity news, this time — brace yourselves — something from actual 2020, Geena Davis’ fireplace appears to be a hellmouth.
Apparently, it’s Neptune, but compare and contrast with this illustration from Catherine of Cleves 15th century Book of Hours.
I suppose if you’re an Olympic archer, you can defend yourself against emerging demons.
Mind you, there are other ways to protect oneself against sworn enemies…
FLATUS
You might, perhaps, want to afflict them “with great shitting and shooting pains … and very great farting”, to say to them:
May your bones split asunder, may your guts burst, may your farting never stop, neither day nor night.
Well, it turns out that 17th century Icelanders can help us there. You can cast fart runes — fretrúnir — on them.
Write these staves on white calfskin with your own blood taken from your thigh and say: ‘I write you 8 åss-runes, 9 naudh-runes, 13 thurs-runes that will plague your belly with bad shit and gas.’
You may want to exercise some caution, given that in 1654 one man was burnt at the stake after admitting casting fretrúnir on a local girl. Or you may not. Each to their own, I say.
On the matter of defending ourselves from harm, would you like to see an illustration from Stefan Jellinek’s 1931 book Electrical Protection in 132 Pictures? You would? Excellent. Here you go.
If you’re paying attention, you will of course see that this should really come further up, in THE UNSAVOURY BIT, but then if you’ve got this far, you should also have ascertained by now that if you want headings which are doing anything more than breaking up a lot of disconnected nonsense, you came to the wrong place.
So, here’s some poetry.
And look at this cartoon.
Isn’t it… er, well, whatever it is? Yes. Whatever it is, it’s a very good example of that.
I have a soft spot, too, for this one by Harry Bliss, which was unaccountably rejected by the New Yorker.
Apparently, there is a book called The Best of the Rejection Collection: 293 Cartoons That Were Too Dumb, Too Dark, or Too Naughty for The New Yorker, and this is in it. I’d say they were fools, but they can clearly tell that 293 is a funnier number than 300, can’t they? And also, they’re the New Yorker and I’m not. So, there’s that.
INCREASING INCOHERENCE
Anyway, would you like to know how to make an elephant? Well, you’re in luck. And it’s nothing complicated about when a mummy elephant and a daddy elephant love each other very much. No, the secret is contained in Frank Bellew’s 1866 book, The Art of Amusing. Obviously.
This is what they used to do in the days before television.
Thank fuck for television. (And where the hell did those tusks come from?)
If it wasn’t for John Logie Baird, people would still be doing this to amuse children.
Which is clearly horrific. Much better to have a childhood in which one learns — from older, wiser persons — such marvels as are contained in this, for example:
A Portable Paradise
by Roger Robinson
And if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.
And if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
And if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself to an empty room — be it hotel,
hostel or hovel — find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.
There. That’s better, isn’t it?
It’s also good to be living in a world where Aardman Animation exists. A splendid cartoonist by the name of Ben Cameron shared this reference board of theirs that he uses for his own work. Isn’t it glorious?
Now, if I could just find out how they made the sound of Feathers McGraw landing in the milk bottle at the end of The Wrong Trousers (the finest sound effect in the history of the motion picture), I could die a happy man.
I have asked, but answer came there none. So far.
But without leaving the topic of fictional creatures, and to return to the matter of pachyderms, it’s time for
A PROPER STORY
A man called Séamas O’Reilly told this. (He’s @shockproofbeats on The Twitter, and also tells a magnificent tale of having to present drinks to the President of Ireland while off his knackers on ketamine.)
Anyway, cast your minds back to the heady, far-off days of people burning down 5G masts to protect themselves from a respiratory illness. Once respected author Naomi Wolf joined the ‘debate’ by suggesting that Belfast, where there was no 5G, was a place of calm.
One or two people, not unadjacent to Northern Ireland, suggested to her that Belfast in fact (a) does have 5G, and (b) was not a place noted for calm in the 1970s. Many of them shared photos of the Troubles to illustrate their point, and it was, as Séamas put it, “very funny”.
What was odd was that one picture kept cropping up. This one:
That is, as you can see, a photo of an elephant at a riot in 1970s Belfast. Séamas and his friend Michael Photoshopped it together for their parody account Remembering Ireland. They billed it as: “Ultra rare shot of Noam Chomsky, Banjo the Elephant at Belfast disturbance, neither of whom were expected, nor subsequently explained c.1970”
Because, if you zoom in, yes, there is, in fact, a professor of linguistics in the photo, too.
As Séamas says in his rather joyous thread, Chomsky’s there to
create uncertainty as to which part was doctored. Surely… we wouldn’t have put in both? [Most people] weren’t taking it at face value … But a little searching showed it had been all over Twitter for some time … What I hadn’t bet on was that so many people might think it was entirely real. Which I now realise happened… a lot. Which brings me to the dazzling conclusion of this tale. When @drwhofreak told me that he had also seen this picture in the wild, but not online. In real life. On the wall of a pub. In Belfast.
(As actual journalists like to say, I have approached the Landsdowne Hotel in Belfast for comment. At time of going to press, alas, I have heard nothing.)
WRAPPING UP
And that’s about all I have for you this year, but before I go, I can tell you that in 2021 I aim to read First You Write a Sentence by Joe Moran, having happened upon an excerpt from it in which he discusses Cambridge maths don G. H. Hardy’s belief that life’s “one great permanent happiness” can be found in pure maths.
Applied maths, the kind that could compute the dimensions of the Forth Bridge or the reach of a radio transmitter, he decried as ‘trivial’. Real maths, he thought, bypassed the world in pursuit of pure abstraction. It was useful only rarely and never on purpose. Like Einstein, Hardy felt above all that equations should be beautiful. ‘A mathematician, like a painter or a poet,’ he wrote, ‘is a maker of patterns.’
Which, while he is clearly wrong (maths is beastly, and pure happiness is best found by reading P. G. Wodehouse), does illustrate the fact that the worlds of art and science are not really, and shouldn’t be, separate. Science is experimentation, after all, and experimentation is play.
Most of all, though, I’ve included this because I think I need USEFUL ONLY RARELY AND NEVER ON PURPOSE on a t-shirt.
Happy Christmas
