Christopher’s Christmas Cracker 2024

Every year, historian John Julius Norwich published a Christmas Cracker — a collection of anecdotes, trivia and witticisms collected from history and literature. Christopher’s approach is the same, except he isn’t a respected historian.

He’s a fucking idiot.

Nasty words

This year, I read the phrase “nourishing seepage” in an online book preview. I mention this here for a number of reasons. Firstly, because, when I told him of this combination of words, my dear friend Richard responded:

All copies of this book must be burned immediately.

Unfortunately for him, I did not concur, and instead ordered a copy of the novel — The Girls, by John Bowen — at once, and devoured it almost as soon as it arrived. It turned out to be my favourite thing I read all year. In fact, I liked it so much, I sent him a copy for his birthday.

Another reason I mention this is that this Christmas Cracker of mine often mentions phrases or sentences I’ve read and enjoyed and wish to share, but normally they appear later, when I’ve warmed to my theme a bit. This year, sitting looking at a blank page, and wondering how to begin, I decided that some apparently nasty words which led to a joyful discovery were the perfect opener.

If it weren’t for the words

NOURISHING SEEPAGE

I would never have discovered the thing, and it’s a marvel. Gloriously mad, and one of those rare books where you quickly forget the writer’s a man. The two leads are convincing female characters, they drive the plot, and they are entirely themselves. Even the minor characters are beautifully drawn. The housekeeper, for example:

Mrs Marshall had been in service in a good house. She had never taken kindly to being ordered about, nor had her employers been altogether comfortable in the presence of a housemaid of six foot two. She had left in 1953 by mutual agreement a week after her twenty-first birthday, which she celebrated by blacking the eye of a baronet.

Splendid stuff, I thought, and if you think “nourishing seepage” is a combination of words that should never be seen in public or spoken of in polite society, how about “hyena butter”? Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? The book I found it in — Ashley Ward’s The Social Lives of Animals — describes it as “a fabulous waxy secretion” which they paste onto vegetation to mark territorial boundaries. Mind you, he does add:

It’s not the kind of butter you’d want to smear on crumpets, though, not least because the hyenas produce it from their anal glands.

The lesson from all of this, I think, is that you may think a phrase is nasty, but you never know what you might read next.

During Ward’s book, for example, I came across — quite early on — a description of whale excrement. They “don’t produce a great whale-sized log”, you see, but “more of a massive, explosive nuggety cloud of Brown Windsor soup…

This is something I learned as I watched from a boat, with an exquisite mixture of delight and horror, as a snorkelling colleague of mine was engulfed in one such gargantuan cetacean bum detonation.

I found this immensely reassuring, for two reasons. I knew, as a reader, that I was in good hands, and also I remembered reading that final phrase before. I searched, discovered it in a review, and remembered that it was exactly this which had prompted me to add it to last year’s Christmas list in the first place. We don’t always get to look back on our past decisions with gratitude in this life, but this was an occasion when I could.

Less-nasty words

Also this year, I read one of Barry Cryer’s autobiographies. People recommended them when the great man died in 2022, so I picked up a second hand copy of You Won’t Believe This But…, and it was, essentially, him using the bare bones of his life story as an excuse to string anecdotes together. Yes, exactly: a joy. Here he is on Willie Rushton:

…and, sod it, here he is again on the same subject:

…on Graham Chapman:

…and he also tells of working with Kenny Everett, whose show was condemned by Mary Whitehouse “as pornography, which made the front pages and, of course, ensured increased viewing figures”.

Anyway, that’s quite a lot of words, so let’s look at…

Some pictures

Here, for example, is a shrew:

No, it doesn’t look in the best of health, does it? It’s an exhibit in Swansea Museum, which I visited this year. They have several small mammals preserved in this fashion.

…including, according to the label, a bank vole, a field vole, a wood mouse, a shrew and a pygmy shrew “collected, dried and pressed”, and not in the 19th century, as you might be forgiven for assuming, but “in 1965 for a Zoology project run by Swansea University to study small mammals at Oxwich, Gower.” Well, each to their own, I suppose. I assume methods have changed since then, but who the hell knows?

Yes, that was a bit nasty, so to make up for it, here is a 19th century Chinese painting of an enormously fat cat:

Apparently, it’s in the Met in New York, or at least in their collection, and illustrates a type of feline which couldn’t catch even a pressed shrew.

Anyway, I think it’s time we moved on to

Things I learned this year because I am a noted intellectual

There’s a theory that caffeine ‘caused’ the Enlightenment. Basically: a stimulant is discovered, and people start selling it. They need somewhere to sell it, so they open coffee shops. This gives you places full of people, buzzing, and talking to each other. You put chairs and tables out. People stay longer, talk more, drink more coffee, and someone spots an opportunity: print news, gossip, jokes, and cartoons, and sell them. There is an explosion of pamphlets, newspapers, and scurrilous satire. The caffeinated people have more to discuss… and there you go, guvnor: got one of them Enlightenments for you.

Not that simple, of course. It was more of a contributory factor, really, but it made me think about another substance that humans imbibe. Water apparently wasn’t safe for much of human history, so people drank Small Beer — weaker than what we drink now, but they were putting away pints and pints of it, often from a relatively young age. So I began to wonder: how much of history can be explained by people being shitfaced? I put this to the hive mind of That Internet, and lo: it’s all bollocks.

Water mostly was safe, and people drank beer because they liked it (and it has calories and vitamins in). Not only that: medieval England couldn’t possibly have grown enough grain for everyone to be drinking beer all day. Martyn Cornell, author of Around the World in 80 Beers has done some research on this, and there were about 3.5 million adults in England in 1300. If they were taking in the recommend 3.5 pints of liquid a day, and only drinking ale, they’d have needed nearly 560 million gallons of it a year, “and much of their time would be spent doing hard labour under a hot sun, when the requirement for liquid might be as high as ten pints a day”.

To give every adult 3.5 pints of ale a day, 83% of the country’s entire grain production would be needed for brewing, which would leave not a great deal for daily bread, and would also have required a brewing industry on an unimaginable scale.

I must confess to finding this a little disappointing at first, but I still enjoy the fact that the Financial Times can accurately describe

the global image of Britain in the 18th century [as] unruly, fearless and probably drunk

…and someone else pointed out that people may not have been uniformly wankered, but there could be value in a historian writing a book about the extent to which a great many epoch-altering military decisions were made by people with toothache.

I’d read it, obviously.

Also this year, I found out that dice used to be made of “a homogenous colloidal dispersion of nitric acid, sulphuric acid, cotton fibers, and camphor”, aka celluloid, “a substance of great tensile strength capable of resisting the effects of water, oils, and even diluted acids … the first commercially successful synthetic plastic”.

These are the words of actor, magician and writer Ricky Jay, who collected such dice, and wrote Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck when he noticed that they “remain stable for decades. Then, in a flash, they can dramatically decompose.” So he got photographer Rosamond Purcell to document the process.

In lieu of alt text: some decomposing celluloid dice, cracking and growing mould, and becoming misshapen, with some of the dots coming off

Some, she writes, “develop a surface powder”, others “fissures … cornices … spikes”. Perhaps best of all, “some, once smooth as ivory, have begun to sink and fold inward like lava”

Anyway, here’s a poem.

Fuck me, that’s good. Let’s have another. In fact, let’s have When My Daughter Tells Me I Was Never Punk by Jessica Walsh.

I say, honey, my being alive is punk. I made my life
out of grudges when I saw the odds placed against me,

when my role was to marry a man who’d kill me
and give me my hot young death, a guy named Charles

who would have and nearly did — the day I said fuck you
and threw his keys in the snow? That was punk.

When I called a nice guy who’d loved me steady
and thought what if I can try staying alive, that was punk;

when I had my last drink and surrendered the scene, that too was punk,
and yes I miss the me who would be dead

because I was a bottle rocket, a pipe bomb of a good time
but my being alive is the middle finger I never put down —

I did not let these days go by, I clawed each one from dirt,
and when I get my nails done I am stockpiling weapons,

when I buy groceries, when I gas up the car,
I am threatening to survive long enough to piss off

a million awful people to be alive in spite of,
I am promising to stay flagrantly alive:

This is my beautiful house. I am this beautiful wife.
How did I get here, I say, by my fucking teeth.

Young people today. Don’t know they’re born, do they? (What does that mean? It’s always eluded me. It’s like ‘She’s no better than she ought to be’. What? So… she’s as good as she should be? Or the scouse cry ‘I am made up!’, uttered in moments of triumph: “I am so happy, It’s turned me into a fictional character”. Still, at least these are just odd colloquialisms, rather than what Americans do to the phrase “I couldn’t care less”…)

Anyway, back to young people, who are apparently all snowflakes or some such drivel. Quite apart from inspecting the people who put forward that argument (invariably arseholes), let’s look at the words of someone who apparently wrote a letter to Town and Country magazine in 1771:

Whither are the manly vigour and athletic appearance of our forefathers flown? Can these be their legitimate heirs? Surely, no; a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles can never have descended in a direct line from the heroes of Potiers and Agincourt…

History doesn’t precisely repeat itself, and you can’t directly apply the learning of history to a current situation, but a knowledge of the past does allow you to note that there’s nothing new under the sun and that you should get some fucking perspective. Also, we should all be using the word ‘fribbles’ again. (‘Poltroon’, too, for that matter.)

And we should all be humming more, I think. Making random noises disconcerts people (especially if one has children; it disturbs them no end, which makes it all the more fun), and — as I learnt this year — it brings us closer to our ancestors. Our living ancestors, that is. By which I mean: I read this year about some research from 2016 which found that

Wild gorillas compose happy songs that they hum during meals.

Apparently, while eating, gorillas make “a steady low-frequency tone that sounds a bit like a sigh of contentment” — or emit “a series of short, differently pitched notes that sounds a little like someone humming a random melody”. One of the researchers told New Scientist:

They don’t sing the same song over and over. It seems like they are composing their little food songs.

Which reminds me of another book I read this year: Stanley Tucci’s Taste. It’s exactly as charming and easy to read as you’d expect, but there are also wonderful, opinionated asides such as the one about how people taste things on cooking shows:

It seems that before whatever is being eaten has touched the tongue of the chef/host/cook, they are rolling their eyes in ecstasy, moaning and shaking their heads … before they have even finished swallowing, the word ‘perfect’ is sanctimoniously whispered.

He adds:

…who the fuck ever, even brilliant chefs, makes something that is ‘perfect’ right out of the gate every time?

…and goes on to describe the process, the pauses and mannerisms, of really tasting something, and then saying to yourself “needs more salt…”. (There is also a story about being served a French sausage while dining with Meryl Streep, in which he announces to the table, “Well, it looks like a fucking horse cock”, which is worth at least half the cover price on its own, but I shouldn’t give too much away.)

The point of all this is that I think we should all Be More Gorilla and compose little songs about how much we like chips. (I also recommend singing Rik Mayall’s ‘Pants, pansitsy-pants, pansitsy-pants, pantsy pants, pantsy pants” song to yourself when you’re hanging out washing, but that’s another matter.)

Which brings me (well, obviously) to:

This is by ‘lexistwit’, and originated on a silly and glorious website called b3ta, which issues regular photoshop challenges. It’s from 2019, but I only saw it this year, which is why it qualifies for inclusion.

Anyway, here’s the full story:

A sequence of four images showing the plasticine character Morph (i) approaching a green egg shaped thing, (ii) looking horrified when a face-hugger leaps out, (iii) lying prone with a face hugger on him and wrapped round his neck, (iv) with a chest-burster from Alien emerging from his torso

After that, we may need a palate cleanser, so let’s go back to improving literature. I’d never read Anita Brookner before this year, and I came upon Hotel du Lac in a bookswap, so I thought “I’ll have some of that”, and it turned out that my instincts were sound.

The lead character is a novelist who’s just left a man at the altar, so her friends send her away to holiday on her own until at least some of the dust has settled. Of course, if you make your lead character a novelist, you’re basically giving yourself permission to have them observe and describe — more, perhaps, than other protagonists could.

Edith, at one point, overhears two people discussing her, one of whom says she’s “In a dream, half the time … making up those stories of hers. I sometimes wonder if she knows what it’s all about.” Another responds: “I’m the one with all the stories … I wonder she doesn’t put me in a book.” There’s a paragraph break to indicate an exquisitely timed pause, and:

I have, thought Edith. You did not recognize yourself.

Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own is extraordinary, too. Going back to those people who think millennials are all weaklings who need more resilience: if they’d had half the life Tomalin has, they’d go running to their nanny (whom they still employ).

There are hilarious bits, too, though — like having George Melly for a neighbour:

In the middle of their ground-floor front window, facing outwards to cheer the passers-by, he hung his Magritte painting, one of the series showing a much larger than life penis with a face and hair. Occasionally you saw a startled response from a pedestrian, but the neighbours took it in their stride.

She also describes his party piece, ‘Man, Woman, Bulldog’

which involved going out into the back garden, removing all his clothes and reappearing three times in different poses, the final one backwards on all fours with a good view of his testicles. There was an innocence to George’s outrageousness: it gave him great pleasure and entertained his friends.

Another memoir I can recommend is Roderic Fenwick Owen’s Oh What a Lovely Century, which announces before the end of page one, that his grandmother was

a notable harlot in Edwardian society

…which sets the tone for much of what follows. In Luxor during WWII, for example, his guide Ali shows him

the god Min, Lord of the Erect Phallus, with his chief attribute protruding parallel to the ground

and takes him behind a statue of Rameses II and

let himself go; and I didn’t object in the least.

(Roderic does not stint on detail. When approached by a publisher who wanted to edit his privately published million-word memoir down, he agreed on condition “that nothing be cut on the grounds of decency”.)

He sojourns in New York for a while, lodging with a painter who offers him a couple of canvases, which look “like segments of an old wall”, so he turns these Jackson Pollocks down. He washes up in Abu Dhabi and becomes court poet to its ruler, and in 1952 finds himself at a London ball eyeing up

a pirate, dancing clumsily. What did that matter? He was very good looking in a swarthy, piratical way, with broad shoulders owing nothing to padding.

Roddy asks

for the pleasure of the next waltz. He smiled back boldly, yet shyly, as though not too sure of himself, before saying in a Scottish accent, “I can only dance as a man, you know.” “Oh, that’s my line too!” I said. “We’ll just trot around the floor. We’ll manage!”

(We are definitely in Julian and Sandy territory here. This mysterious Scot almost certainly had thews like an oak, and bulging lallies.) They are told off for dancing together (“Those are gentlemen with gentlemen dressed as ladies. That’s quite in order! It’s two gentlemen dancing together dressed as gentlemen that’s forbidden”), and the pirate says

he’d come to the big city hoping to find a job in the theatre. It seemed rather an unlikely aspiration for someone looking like a garage-hand, but what a splendid garage-hand! Good physique, doggy eyes and an attractive brogue…

He invites the man back to his house “where without further ado we hopped into the double-bed”. Alas, it was not to be the night Roddy hoped for

“I don’t mind a bit of sky-larking, Rod,” he said. “But I’d be happier with the lights out.” A pity. He was hairy in all the right places, and muscular, with another attraction, a soft/hard manner uniquely his own … Who could have guessed that he would shoot up as spectacularly as he did, showering an admiring world with thunderclaps? One of the great heart-throbs of our times, even voted ‘the sexiest man alive’.

As a footnote points out:

All the clues point to this being Sean Connery, who would have been in his early twenties at the time, seeking to become an actor after an early career as a body-builder.

(Roderic’s memoir was published in 2022, when Connery was safely dead and couldn’t contact any lawyers.)

Without changing the subject much, or at least without raising the tone any, I think we can now move on to

Books I have not read this year

(and will not in any other year, either). To begin with:

It’s a historical novel from 1913, apparently, set during the Great Revolt, a Jewish uprising against Roman rule in Judea in the first century AD. (I know. You don’t give a shit about that any more than I do. We’re just here for the silliness and vulgarity.)

Let’s move on, then, to this selection from a holiday cottage, spotted by writer Helen Macdonald who was of the considered opinion that she could see a theme emerging:

(No, I don’t think anyone would question Ethel Mannin’s assertion there.)

I also know that I shall never fully read or act on this, no matter how much I might believe that its existence is a boon to the world.

Yes, that really does say Charles Mingus, and there weren’t two of them. It’s the same one who recorded Jazz at Massey Hall in 1953 with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Max Roach — sometimes billed as ‘The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever’.

Being a musician, Charles was not a stranger to late nights, and apparently grew weary of returning home to a full litter tray (courtesy of a cat called ‘Nightlife’). So the year after that apparently seminal album, he wrote this, and — rather public-spiritedly — began to distribute it freely.

Basically, you train your cat to use a cardboard tray, using torn-up newspaper as litter, and gradually move it into the bathroom. In stages, you trim the sides of the box until it’s just a flat bit of card. Eventually, you attach it to the top of the bog.

Then, you start reducing the quantity of newspaper, and cut a hole in the cardboard, which you gradually increase in size. Before long, you’re ready to put the cardboard under the seat.

You will see when he has got his balance properly.

…and then you’re ready to dispense with the cardboard altogether, and your resident feline will independently use a human lavatory. He adds:

Don’t be surprised if you hear the toilet flush in the middle of the night. A cat can learn how to do it

…which begs the response: no fucking cat I’ve ever met. Still, I pass this on in case you find it useful or diverting.

Further cultural gleanings

One of the marvellous things about social media is that you can interact with, and enjoy offcuts from the work of, people you might otherwise only know from afar. The splendid comedy writer Ian ‘swearing consultant on The Thick Of It’ Martin is one such, and earlier this year, he posted “The original draft of Elvis Presley’s ‘Hound Dog’.” This was, he claimed, the work of John Betjeman, which is why it goes like this:

Oh beastly, beastly beagle
So lachrymose and glum.
You failed to bag a rabbit
And you cannot be my chum.

Your bona fides dazzled,
But they were counterfeit.
Your quarry is too fast for you
And you too slow for it.

Oh beastly, beastly beagle
It’s sulky no-speaks now.
I’ll send you not to Coventry
But somewhere worse, to Slough.

This, like a lot else here, happened years ago, but if I found out about it in 2024, it goes in. Those are the rules. On which note, here’s a picture of Kingsley Amis:

He was, apparently, asleep on a beach while on holiday in Yugoslavia in 1963, and the assessment of his physique and character was written by his first wife, Hilly — in lipstick, which must have made it a challenge to remove, and thus for him to live up to his own adage:

A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil your lunch.

She had grown not unreasonably weary of his philandering, you see, and — while we would probably not describe the Amis of 1963 as obese if he was around today — he had just published his fifth novel, One Fat Englishman.

On the subject of 20th century culture, I am indebted to twlldun on Bluesky for pointing out that:

Josef Stalin met Denis Healey. Denis Healey met Zig and Zag. Zig and Zag met the late, great Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the Wu Tang Clan.

He described this as “the greatest three degrees of separation ever”. Accurately I think. Which brings me to:

Other splendid sentences I have happened upon

Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite — The Transformations of John Donne contains this

…it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished

…which rather sounds like the metaphysical poet turned Dean of St Paul’s is reaching across the centuries to tell me not to be a grumpy old bastard and to live in the moment a bit, to which I can only say, I do try, John, but… we are what we are.

Also, Penelope Lively’s The Road to Lichfield from 1977 has just been reissued, and she observes, of children contemplating their parents:

In the end it is consistency you want from people, not perfection. Betrayal is to find them do what you would not have expected. Just that.

…and I picked up Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower in a charity shop, a historical novel about someone I’d never heard of — Friedrich von Hardenberg, who published under the pen name ‘Novalis’ — and it was great. Just one aside

jollity is just as relentless as piety

is enough to allow you to picture completely the person the protagonist is talking to.

Right…

…time to look at this:

…and this:

They’re by Ed McLachlan, who died in September. He made it to 84, but still. I like cartoons, so I like cartoonists.

This is another one of his.

I do enjoy a bit of gleeful silliness. (This may not altogether come as news to you.) Anyway, I mentioned the pleasures of social media earlier, and another is cross-fertilisation. That is, I don’t need to be on reddit to enjoy some of its highlights, because someone will invariably share them. Like this, from r/relationship_advice:

My boyfriend drew me, and I made a joke about it. Now he feels terrible and won’t calm down — how do I fix this?

So, I [18F] asked my boyfriend [18M] to draw me a while back, and recently he decided to give it a shot. We’ve been dating for 7 months. He’s not super confident in drawing people and … I immediately noticed it highlighted a couple of things I’m insecure about — like my shoulders and stomach. But instead of being upset, I found it kind of funny and joked about how he managed to capture all my insecurities perfectly. I wasn’t serious, just trying to be playful. Well, he didn’t take it the way I expected. He started apologizing over and over, saying he didn’t mean to upset me and that he thought those parts of the drawing looked nice.

This continues for some time, with him panicking and feeling guilty and her “trying to make him feel better and understand that I wasn’t actually hurt”, before finally ending with: “Any advice on how to approach this?”

Only then do we arrive at the heart of the matter: “Here’s the drawing”…

…

…

…

Sorry, I’m going to make you scroll for a bit here, as a sort of pause for effect.

…

…

…

(Some of my friends get a paper version of this, and I’m making them turn a page.)

…

…

…

…and if you haven’t just audibly snorted with laughter, you’re a better person than I. Sorry about the scrolling. Worth it, though, wasn’t it?