Christopher’s Christmas Cracker

Coates
14 min readDec 19, 2023

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In case you haven’t seen one of these before: Every year, historian and travel writer John Julius Norwich published a Christmas Cracker — a collection of anecdotes, trivia and witticisms collected from history and literature during the year. I have stolen the idea and made it stupider. Basically, if you’ve ever wondered what a review of the year would be like if it was written by a fool, here’s your answer.

So, to begin with…

Someone tried to compromise my editorial integrity this year. Thankfully, I maintain rigidly high standards, only allowing in to this highly important review the things which amuse and divert me, and I cannot be bought.

If I could, I would be mentioning here my friend Helen and the book she gave me with the words

I thought it might be something for your Christmas Cracker.

It was How to Avoid Huge Ships: And Other Implausibly Titled Books, published 15 years ago to mark the 30th anniversary of the Diagram Prize, the annual contest to find the oddest book title of the year.

Yes, it’s a good job I am as high-minded as I am, or I might have given in to this wilful act of attempted bribery and shown you this:

A large man with a moustache and glasses, wearing dungarees, stands with his arm round an old, rusty tractor. The book (for this is a book cover) is entitled ‘Old Tractors and the men who love them’, and subtitled ‘How to keep your tractors happy and your family running’

And, moved to joy by the expression on that man’s face, I might have succumbed to the temptation to tell you about

Front cover: Entertaining with Insects — or: The Original Guide to Insect Cookery, by Ronald L Taylor and Barbara J Carter. The design features those words in a lozenge, surrounded by line drawings of bees, wasps, beetles and butterflies

…and the recipe inside for Garlic Butter Fried Insects which informs us that “Mealworms are especially delicious prepared in this manner” — an assertion of which I am sceptical. There are also instructions on how to prepare Dry Roasted Insects, essential in making:

Basic Insect Flour Dry roast insects (see preceding recipe) and blend in electric blender until a delicate flour is produced. The amount of flour resulting from a given quantity of dry roasted insects varies with the insect used. One cup of bees, for example, reduces to a smaller quantity of flour than does 1 cup of mealworms.

…which is clearly both foul and unhinged, but also surely unwise. When the future of humanity is threatened, and vital pollinating insects are dying out in worrying numbers, does it make sense to trap, dry and grind them? I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, that it does not.

On the subject of unusual food, though…

…I discovered this year that if you don’t think the five-bird roast — a quail stuffed inside a partridge, the partridge rammed up a pheasant, that combination inserted into a chicken, and then the whole thing placed inside a turkey (all of them boned) — is indulgent enough, or you happen to have 80 to 100 people dropping in for a late supper, there is an alternative: you can stuff a camel. With a lamb. Which has been stuffed with five chickens. Obviously.

Skin, trim, and clean the camel, lamb, and chickens, and boil until tender. (Be sure the pot is large enough.) Cook rice until fluffed. Fry nuts until brown, and mix with rice. Hard-boil the eggs and peel them. Stuff the chickens with eggs and rice. Stuff the lamb with five of the chickens and some rice. Stuff the camel with the lamb and more rice. Broil in large oven until brown. Spread the remaining mixed rice on a large tray and place the camel on top.

(Yes, that is a recipe from someone in Michigan, rather than Riyadh. As a result of a 19th century experiment to use them for hauling military supplies, there were feral camels in the United States in the 20th, which may — partly — explain this.)

Anyway, I hope I’ve made it clear that people who buy me stuff can’t just inveigle their way in to this important cultural round-up — and that we won’t be discussing absurd book titles here. I am an intellectual, interested in history, so we’re going to discuss learned works such as:

The dark pink spine of an old book. The words printed on it read: Biggles Takes it Rough, Captain W E Johns

discovered in a second-hand bookshop in Margate by crime writer William Shaw.

Or

Actually, we’re not going to discuss either of them. In the case of the latter because Dan Piepenbring wrote 750 words about it for The Paris Review in 2015, headlined ‘Don’t Read This Book’. (Disappointing, apparently.)

Well, what should we be reading then, Coates, if you’re so clever?

Well, obviously, we should take a moment to appreciate Grace Jones describing in her autobiography how Pull Up to the Bumper is PURELY AND SIMPLY ABOUT PARKING.

So we have a car, and it’s long, because it’s a limousine, speeding down a Manhattan avenue, all the lights on green, through the steam pouring into the night, and you want to keep it clean, so you wax it and rub it, giving it a shine, and it’s hard to park, because we’re in the city, and it’s so big, so you have to squeeze it into tight spaces, between certain obstacles, and nudge up against the car in front of you or behind you or both. You make it fit, and it is such a great feeling. Obviously, this could sound like you were talking about something else. If you wanted, you could imagine that I am not singing about a car at all. But that’s up to you. If you think the song is not about parking a car, shame on you.

There is also a splendid bit about Trevor Horn calling her to say he needed her “now” at a studio which was “only fifteen minutes away from my apartment. It wasn’t like I had to cross the Atlantic.” Unfortunately, he caught her

just when I was setting fire to Dolph’s trousers … I made it three days later … Did he want me on time and in a bad mood, and therefore of no use, or late and in a good mood, and ready for action?

You might also want to read, as I did this year in Fanny & Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England, about

… the practice of French male prostitutes in drag, who wore false bosoms made from boiled sheep’s lights — or lungs — cut to shape and then inflated. ‘One of the prostitutes complained to me the other day,’ the Parisian doctor François-Auguste Veyne reported, ‘that a cat had eaten one of his breasts which he had left to cool down in his attic.’

Or you may not. Each to their own.

Something which brought me great pleasure this year was a strange, melancholic 1967 film called The London Nobody Knows, a tour of out-of-the-way bits of the capital in the company of James Mason. It crops up on Talking Pictures TV occasionally (aka telly for old gits), and the whole thing is up on That Internet. I can recommend it highly, and if you watch the end titles, you discover it was written by Geoffrey Fletcher, based on his own book of the same name. And if you work at a university with a well-stocked library, you never know what you might find…

Front cover, first edition, The London Nobody Knows, 1962 Penguin book, featuring distinctive orange bar across the top, containing the title, and a colour photo of a cast iron lamp on the side of a building
Title page of book on right, and facing it on the left, a line drawing of 12 Langford Place. It has two deeply pitched roofs, and a single storey section which just out at the front, also steeply pitched, and with a bay window with a gothic mullioned window, and what could almost be a medieval helmet over it

The book has the same wistful air as the film, celebrating a vanishing old London. An early highlight is

a favourite of mine — though I often tremble for its future — the gas lamp in Carting Lane.

Line drawing of ornate, cast iron gas lamp on lane behind The Savoy Hotel, with cars and pigeons in the background

The Sewer Gas Destructor Lamp, though, is still there — not as some weird tourist attraction, but because it has a purpose: burning off the flammable gases you get from rivers of excrement.

A few pages later, and

of all the London cemeteries, Kensal Green, in Paddington, is, I think, the most melancholy … a sort of Père Lachaise, a necropolis where the noise of the railway and the gasworks drowns the song of the birds who hop about the obelisks and mausolea… Meanwhile, the railway shrieks and clatters, and a blackbird perches on the decayed top of an urn.

Line drawing of Kensal Green cemetery showing a variety of large monumental masonry, a tree to the left, and in the background, two gasholders

…and

An extensive area underlying the Camden goods yard is honeycombed with … catacombs … Glistening damp steals down the walls … it is like walking into a drawing by Piranesi

Line drawing of tunnel, with brickwork walls, lit from above by holes punched through from ground level above

My favourite bit of the Camden section of the film is this windowsill cat:

Well-groomed, well-fed black and wite cat sitting on a basement windowsill

…although I was quite taken with the mental picture this sign conjured up: of a chestnut bay, perhaps, behind a desk.

White lettering on red board reads Horse Superintendent’s Office

And the book can’t treat you to the street entertainer who declares that he had to be a busker, because

Well, I’m a genius, and I felt I was psychologically unfit for normal work.

Two men in junk shop costumes prop up a bar. The one on the left has a tricorn hat and a white tailcoat. The younger man on the right has a brocaded velvet jacket and a red/white striped hat. He is looking at camera as he talks
Of course you are, dear

So, both are worth checking out if you can. The History Press has reprinted the book, and you can still find second-hand copies of the original.

Anyway, it’s time now…

…to look at French-American artist Louise Bourgeois wearing a monkey fur coat and grinning at us as she holds a gigantic bronze cock and balls under her arm.

Louise Bourgeois photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe. She stands slightly to the right of the frame against a plain grey background. She is shown from her waist up with her body in three quarter profile, and her face turned towards the camera. She wears a dark, tufted monkey fur coat and has one of her sculptures tucked under her right arm, holding it in place with her right hand. This phallic sculpture, Fillette, which translates as ‘little girl’ in French, is a plaster work covered in latex

You see — I was right, wasn’t I? As the man in this cartoon says…

Sam Gross cartoon: two men stand in front of an enormous sign which reads STOP AND THINK. One says to the other: “It sort of makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?”

That’s by cartoonist Sam Gross, who died in May this year, and was clearly brilliant. This is another of his:

Two snails in front of a tape dispenser, which slightly resembles a snail. One says to the other: “I don’t care if the is a tape dispenser. I love her.”

I rather like this one, too, which I discovered when people posted his stuff after he died.

Two prison guards look down at a man lying in a prison yard. The prisoner has been stripped below the waist, and a string runs from his genitals to a kite flying into a dark cloud above the scene. One guard says to the prisoner: “We are a very poor country, and we can’t afford to buy electrodes for your testicles.”

Another of his famous ones is perhaps the most profound comment on meat-eating I’ve quoted so far.

A man and woman sit at a restaurant table next to a sign on the wall which reads “Try our frogs’ legs”. They are also by the open door to the kitchen, through which a frog with no legs has just emerged, pushing itself along on a small cart with its ‘arms’

…and it’s hard not to like:

A pig sits behind a desk strewn with papers, holding a manuscript. He has his sleeves rolled up and is looking enthusiastically at the papers in his hand. A man sits opposite him. The pig says “This is shit. We’re going to publish it.”

Another splendid bit of drawing I saw this year was this, by Francois Maumont.

A man in a dark suit points emphatically at an exit door, telling another man to leave. The man he’s trying to communicate with is standing inside a vending machine, behind the glass, eating chocolate

…but for sheer class, I think you really have to look to Twitterer Alexandra Kuri, who asked one day, “what should I draw?”, and got the answer (from me, at least): “A pillar box growing out of Bob Holness’s head”. To her very great credit, she took up the suggestion.

A line drawing of Bob Holness (a middle-aged man in glasses, with a cheery smile) with a pillar box growing out of his head

Another wonderful cartoonist died this year, too — Tony Husband, creator of Private Eye’s ‘Yobs’, and co-creator of children’s-equivalent-of-Viz, Oink! He made gleefully vulgar, silly work such as this:

Two couples on either side of a room with two sofas facing each other, drinking glasses of wine. One couple looks rather disturbed, and the wife from the other couple looks cross. Between them stands the husband of the cross wife, trousers down, pulling his buttocks apart to show the first couple his arse. His wife is saying: “Mark, perhaps Karen and Peter don’t want to see your piles!”

…but also created a book about his father’s dementia, and another about his son’s drug addiction. The knowledge of life, the detail, the sheer heart of this one is extraordinary.

A dog looks at a man in a chair, its tail wagging, a happy expression on its face. The man, slumped in a chair with two empty bottles beside it, is pouring himself another drink from a third bottle. He looks dishevelled and unhappy, and is saying to the dog: “Go away, I’m not who you think I am”

Anyway, that’s quite a lot of pictures, so…

Here are some sentences

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.

That’s from Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which I must clearly read, rather than just seeing quotes on Twitter and going ‘ooh!’

In my defence, though, I did re-read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber this year, marvelling once again at such gems as:

The heavy sword, unsheathed, grey as that November morning, sharp as childbirth, mortal.

It’s quite different reading that 30 years after you first did, having, in the intervening years, watched someone give birth. (Is it any wonder that so many men die in the book?)

…without a moment’s hesitation, she raised my father’s gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband’s skull.

Meanwhile, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The True Heart has a description of

a dull noisy man with resounding thighs, and lips that were too red to look quite pleasant among so much, and such bristling, hair.

Mind you, there is also the way in which

her mother had cured many stubborn cases of whooping cough by the remedy of a mouse dipped in batter, fried alive, and eaten hot before going to bed.

…which is rather horrid. Perhaps you’d prefer to learn, from Emily Cockayne’s Hubbub, that 18th century diarist Parson Woodforde

suffered from a boil on his bum that made him feverish until it ‘discharged itself in the night excessively’.

No, I see what you mean. Perhaps you wouldn’t. Well, never mind, enjoy Lev Parikian’s description of penguins from his splendid Taking Flight:

piebald blubber tubes

There — that’s made it all better, hasn’t it? (And Jonathan Slaght’s Owls of the Eastern Ice describes Blakiston’s Fish Owl as a “defiant, floppy goblin”, which helps, too.)

Anyway, onto…

Miscellaneous Cultural Gleanings

Did you know that Peter Greenaway was the first director to be offered Who Framed Roger Rabbit?? Yes, the same Peter Greenaway responsible for The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

He told Vulture this year:

I had an agent after the success of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. There were people knocking on my door all the time. And looking back, do you remember a film called Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I was the first director asked to actually film that. Would you believe that? I found that absolutely extraordinary. I think that was because of a Hollywood agent who didn’t really understand my cinema at all. God bless him. But I was the name to conjure with for six months. So he threw me in there, and I managed to be one of the first directors to actually read the script.

Some of the what-ifs of history really are extraordinary things. And did you also know that Mr Wint from Diamonds are Forever is George McFly’s dad? It’s not a very well-kept secret, what with them having the same surname, but it was kept from me until 2023.

Crispin Glover, left, and Bruce Glover, right

And did you know that Dame Edna once asked Jeffrey Archer:

Do you laugh at yourself?

and then, after an exquisitely timed pause, added:

Because if not, you’re missing the joke of the century.

You did if you read Barry Humphries’ Telegraph obituary. He also enjoyed surreptitiously spilling large quantities of Heinz Russian Salad on the pavement,

consisting largely of diced potato in mayonnaise with a few peas and carrot chips thrown in, closely resembles human vomit. While disgusted pedestrians would give it a wide berth, I’d kneel down by one of the larger puddles, produce a spoon from my top pocket and enjoy several mouthfuls.

Did you also know that Herculaneum has a statue of the god it was named after? Well, of course it does. But did you know it’s of him shitfaced, stumbling out of a nightclub?

A statue of Hercules. He has what looks like a baguette over one shoulder, and is holding his penis in the other hand, apparently in mid-flow
The statue shows him in the act of saying “I’ll be right with you” as he relieves himself into a roadside plant pot or perhaps litter bin

He also seems to be in possession of a French loaf, or perhaps a rolling pin, which he’s nicked because he knows it will come in useful and which will entirely mystify him in the morning.

Thanks to an academic called Robert Stagg, who spotted a review of Irene Vallejo’s history of books, Papyrus, in the Times Literary Supplement, I also know that when Herculaneum

was discovered under many layers of volcanic ash in the eighteenth century, the archaeologist-explorers used as torches the charred coal-like sticks they found during their excavation. As these adventurers felt their way underground in the hope of uncovering long-lost secrets of ancient wisdom, their path was lit by what we now know were scrolls of ancient Greek philosophy turning to smoke in their hands.

And, did you know there’s a proper scientific term for what my Twitter mutual Rose Ruane memorably described as

The unbidden, mysterious & absolutely planetary urge to simply cunt my handbag right into the Thames for a right, daft wizard wheeze anytime I cross a bridge

Well, there is. It’s the ‘imp of the perverse’, named after an Edgar Allen Poe short story, and describes all those weird, intrusive thoughts, which are apparently part of the brain’s way of solving problems. Your subconscious shoves these things into your conscious brain not just for a laugh because it’s a bastard, but so that we consider solutions to potential difficulties.

A more extreme version of the same thing, the ‘call of the void’ means you think “ooh, I could jump” when you’re somewhere high, because the conscious brain slightly misreads the message to back away from danger. The human brain is odd — and not just mine.

Anyway…

…here’s a poem by Stefan Mohamed.

Traditional Pub Menu Colonial hooligan bantering on a bed of redacted wince / Common hubris with … gammon libel and green unpleasant hills / Vindictive maypole fried in vague embarrassment, with flag ennui / Small grey headaches braised in nostalgia / Fish empire locked in a headache of grey motorway / Crippling pagan canal with jailed sheep and loutish gravy / Wet green bulldog with repressed ham / Perfidious tradwife on a bed of nervous Morrissey, with rose vomit and corrupt ale
Balding village with fag butt lager, bleak beans and stale emojis / Strolling violence, slow cooked in legitimate concerns, with fucked pebbles and strained patter / World cup, with choice of world wars / Meadowsweet bantz with tired old pride and white noise / Mean-spirited queue baked in walloping Thames, with flaked cronyism and stone circles / Hard border stewed in damp class system / Toxic Y-fronts with guilty seaside and White Vin Man / Victim complex baked in sloppy denial, with custard

And here’s what its auction listing described as

a large and impressive 20th century anthropomorphic taxidermy diorama depicting the execution of Louis XVI, featuring grey squirrels as the participants

for which we must thank historical novelist Laura Shepherd-Robinson.

In lieu of alt text, which you can’t do on multiple images: A scene at a guillotine, showing a decapitation, an executioner holding up a severed head, and spectators looking variously bored and horrified, some knitting, some picnicking. All are taxidermied squirrels

And here is an actual question from The Complete A Level Maths, by Orlando Gough, a man who knows how to get people interested in his subject:

The happiness H of a man is a function of the volume V of Guinness that he has drunk during the day: H = 12V — V2–20, V≥0 where V is measured in pints, H in IEU (international ecstasy units). What is the most sensible amount of Guinness for him to drink every day? What change in happiness results from drinking an extra pint of Guinness when he has already drunk: (a) 3 pints; (b) 20 pints? How much Guinness must he drink to reach Total Despair (-500 IEU)?

Sadly, the book was published in 1987, too late for me (not that I got to A Level maths anyway). Still, it does bring back fond memories of the New Year’s Eve I spent in Exmouth one year when I drank 11 pints of Guinness and was driven home by a man who’d had 13. I might have had 13 if I hadn’t dropped two completely full pints as they were handed to me. I don’t remember feeling discontented from excess, only discombobulated as I walked around a town in which it is traditional to walk about in fancy dress on 31 December, so you find yourself lurching from one pub to another, attired, for example, like Stan Laurel, only to see an army of Vikings approaching from a side road.

Anyway…

…you know that bloke Peter Glazebrook who grows the freakishly enormous vegetables?

Here he is:

A smiling, genial man in gardening clothes, and in a rural landscape, holding an onion bigger than his head

I discovered this year that comedian Olaf Falafel once painted him for a charity exhibition.

Painting of the same man, but with an enormous onion for a head, holding his smiling head as if it was a prize onion

I consider this to be A Very Good Thing. As is this, which I discovered from the Twitter account Whores of Yore:

Two old people in clothes of yesteryear pose under mistletoe. The bearded man of the couple kisses the smiling woman in the hat

Posting it, historian Kate Lister, who runs the account, said

The word ‘mistletoe’ derives from the old English ‘tān’, meaning ‘twig’ and the Germanic base ‘mix’ (‘mistle’), which means ‘dung’. It literally means ‘shitty twig’. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests this may be because ‘the plant is propagated in the excrement of birds’.

Obviously, it was very important that you know this. So, as Tiny Tim didn’t quite say: Happy bird shit on a tree season, everyone.

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Coates
Coates

Written by Coates

Purveyor of niche drivel; marker of odd anniversaries

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