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:
And, moved to joy by the expression on that man’s face, I might have succumbed to the temptation to tell you about
…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:
…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.
(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:
…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
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…
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.
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.
…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
My favourite bit of the Camden section of the film is this windowsill cat:
…although I was quite taken with the mental picture this sign conjured up: of a chestnut bay, perhaps, behind a desk.
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.
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.
You see — I was right, wasn’t I? As the man in this cartoon says…
That’s by cartoonist Sam Gross, who died in May this year, and was clearly brilliant. This is another of his:
I rather like this one, too, which I discovered when people posted his stuff after he died.
Another of his famous ones is perhaps the most profound comment on meat-eating I’ve quoted so far.
…and it’s hard not to like:
Another splendid bit of drawing I saw this year was this, by Francois Maumont.
…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.
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:
…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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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:
I discovered this year that comedian Olaf Falafel once painted him for a charity exhibition.
I consider this to be A Very Good Thing. As is this, which I discovered from the Twitter account Whores of Yore:
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.