They’ve been doing the nursing. I merely provide the fruit juice, aspirin, iPod and light meals. Oh, and the bed.
Cats and offal
In view of the previous discussion on the dining habits of cats versus dogs I was interested to hear, entirely coincidentally, the story of Thomas Hardy’s heart.
In the course of a delightful weekend away with merely my faithful hound for company in the gorgeous cottage of generous friends in Cromer (photos here) I broke the habit of several years and watched the television. From which I learnt the story of the cat and the biscuit tin. Which goes something like this.
Thomas Hardy wanted to be buried in his local churchyard in Dorset. The authorities wanted him to be interred in poets’ corner in Westminster Abbey. A compromise was reached – his heart was removed by a doctor, for local burial; his body was cremated and the ashes despatched to London.
The story goes that the removed organ was stored overnight before the burial ceremony wrapped in a tea towel and placed in a biscuit tin. The next day the doctor returned to find an open tin, a bloody towel and a fat cat.
Sadly the internet reveals a huge number of variants on this tail tale. The cat was his own beloved Cobby, a blue persian given to him late in his life. Cobby disappeared when Hardy died. Alternatively it was another moggy belonging either to his housekeeper, his sister or the doctor himself. The cat may have just snatched the organ from the kitchen table without having to open a biscuit tin. The consumed organ may have been replaced, for purposes of the burial, with either a pig’s heart, a calf’s heart or, best of all, the slaughtered body of the offending feline. There’s poetic justice!
That’s more than enough about cats. Here’s a picture of Maizy the salty sea dog to redress the balance. While we were away she licked the sky and reports that it tastes remarkably similar to the sea.
What do you mean, a dog would also eat a heart if it found it lying about, regardless of whose chest it had been removed from? Prove it!
Why you should not self-lobotomise
Because at some point in the process you will become unconscious and slither to the floor with your brain exposed. At that point the cat will come and eat it.
True Fact of Life, as the second-born has taken to saying.
This True Fact of Life was brought to you by the Cottontail Hour.
Heaven in water
I believd I could see heaven by looking into the water.
John Clare, quoted by Iain Sinclair in Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s “Journey Out of Essex”
I wrote my thesis on the bird poems of John Clare for no better reason than that John Clare was my brother’s favourite poet and after his death a year or so earlier I had inherited many of his books including John Clare: Bird Poems published by the Folio Society with illustrations by Thomas Bewick. Oh, and I also liked birds.
I ended up liking John Clare very much indeed too. He was mad of course.
Small mind and big brain
An interesting day . I went to interview Branko Milanovic for the openDemocracy podcast. He was late. He apologised profusely. He said we would understand when we heard his story. We did.
He just missed a train on the underground. As it clattered out of the station the draught of air caught up his cap and blew it over the edge of the platform.
Obviously resourceful and unflappable he approached a person nearby and asked if he could use his umbrella to fish the cap up with. He knew it was pouring with rain, he knew he had quite a walk at the other end of his tube journey, he didn’t want to get utterly soaked.
The cap was swiftly successfully hooked and landed. Only then did the trouble start. The next train due in to the station was stopped and held just outside while he and the owner of the brolly were hustled away by some form of station security official.
They were both, including the brolly owner who had done nothing except lend the item in question, given a good dressing down. And, most bizarrely of all, they were told that they were not allowed to catch another train from the station in question. They were made to leave the building and told to continue their journeys by other means.
This incident seem an extraordinary overreaction to a deed which while not exactly recommended seems to have been quick, safe and successful, and the addition of the small-minded vindictiveness of refusing to allow them to get on a train at that station seems the act of a bully.
I wondered whether the treatment he received had anything to do with his accent which would have revealed him as being not British in origin. Perhaps an extension of Polish plumber paranoia to the London underground.
Branko Milanovic, as irony would have it, has interesting things to say about unease in Europe and the USA over globalisation, arguing that fear of immigration is one of two main causes of the dissatisfaction.
He’s also got a great illustration of the effects of genuine free movement of labour from football and what he terms the “leg drain”. Maybe FIFA should be put in charge of an global ministry of workers.
A kiss at sunset by the bandstand
Twisting and turning
Have you ever, in an idle moment, thought to yourself “I must find out what the tallest isolated stone column in the world is”? No? Neither have I. But today I went up it. It’s a monument. In fact it’s The Monument, which was built to commemorate the Great Fire which destroyed much of the City of London in the seventeenth century. Inscribed in Latin at the bottom is:
In the year of Christ 1666, on 2 September, at a distance eastward from this place of 202 ft, which is the height of this column, a fire broke out in the dead of night which, the wind blowing, devoured even distant buildings, and rushed devastating through every quarter with astonishing swiftness and noise … On the third day … at the bidding, we may well believe, of heaven, the fire stayed its course and everywhere died out.
Inside the column are 311 steps illuminated by some rather sickly florescent light and stabs of sunlight through the original slit windows. They circle up to a caged viewing platform just below the extraordinary golden spiky mutant pineapple thing (apparently a “flaming urn”) perched on the top.
It was surprisingly crowded and whenever I stopped to attempt to take a picture in these less than ideal circumstance someone walked into the shot. Here is a rather anxious-looking young man coming down as we went up.
And here is a valiant mother carrying her daughter up as we went down.
Three little maids from school are we
Pert as a school-girl well can be
Filled to the brim with girlish glee
Three little maids from school
I have two friends from my schooldays, and it’s a bit of a miracle. We scattered when 16, did stuff, went places, stuff happened. Years passed. Whole decades elapsed.
The fact that we’re still in touch is largely the result of the gentle concern (dogged determination?) of one of us. We now lie along a line between Yorkshire, London and Brittany.
One of us may be a sad-minded pedant, but almost undoubtedly isn’t. One of us definitely writes brilliant poetry. Another might. Two of us certainly have dogs. And now, all three of us have blogs. How fantastically cool is that? It’s the first time I’ve had the blogging thing working in reverse, meat-spacers coming online as it were.
So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please meet the fellow perts:
Tall Girl of Smoke and Ash
and
Lucy of Box Elder
w00000t!
(I resisted the temptation to refer to another famous female trinity
Thunder and lightning.
Enter three WITCHES.First Witch
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?Second Witch
When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.Third Witch
That will be ere the set of sun.
They probably didn’t go to school together.)
Giant bunnies do my head in
I have a long-standing interest in rabbits. One of my early triumphs in the media world was as a teenager when I won a television game show after delivering a devastatingly effective lecture on the agricultural efficiency of rabbit-rearing. Did you know that your common-or-garden bunny is the most efficient converter of fodder to meat of all domesticated animals? Most of my astonished and adoring audience didn’t either.
One evening some years previously I had been left at home alone with the television. We weren’t allowed to watch much tv as children and never went to the cinema so (as a preemptive defence for the sad revelation which is to follow) I was not versed in deconstructing the genre. Needless to say my backside was cemented to the sofa the moment the door closed behind the exiting authorities and the television was on full blast.
As the evening wore on the house became filled with darkness, only the characteristic wavering blue light of the screen providing any illumination. Perhaps I was already uneasy. Perhaps the isolation of the house, out in the countryside, the quavering lament of the hooting of the owls… [oh for goodness sake just get to the point and stop trying to make excuses]
Ok. A film started. It was called Night of the Lepus (“they were born that tragic moment when science made its great mistake… now from behind the shroud of night they come, a scuttling, shambling horde of creatures destroying all in their path“) and frankly, I was terrified. So terrified that it took a great deal of effort to pull myself out of the hypnotic paralysis of fear, motionless as I was like a small lagomorph in the lights of an oncoming pantechnicon [surely you mean a rabbit] [no I don’t mean rabbit, I chose the words small lagomorph quite deliberately, and with the help of a friend, because there are only so many terms you can use to refer to the creature in question] [but that link you’ve just given lists hundreds of different words for rabbits] [look just shut up and stop interrupting, it was you who wanted me to get to the point] [. . .] [thank you]
Where was I? Oh yes. Well, to cut a long story short, the film was about giant killer rabbits. And of course the elaborate periphrasis is to attempt to soften the blow of the cold, hard, truth. Which is that I was terrified witless by one of the worst films ever made. If not the worst. Yes. I confess. I hang my head in shame. However I take heart, belatedly, in my middle years, from this clearly highly empathetic review:
Lepus is a failure on every level – it was even rated PG, not an auspicious start for a horror film – but it isn’t too hard to imagine it being terrifying for young children, by dint of the interminable slow-motion stampeding rabbit footage (which begins to take on a surreal quality) and the mixture of monster-bunny noises (they sound alternatively like cattle, elephants, and cassettes being chewed up in a tape deck). The juxtaposition of harmless cuddly animals turning into hopping mad omnivores (not carnivores, as the film suggests) may be exactly the kind of thing to give some kids nightmares.
No wonder I always found Harvey a deeply disturbing film.
My current interest in bunnies wavers between the agricultural (let me get my teeth into you) and the horror (let me bash your brains out with a spade) and actually half the entire purpose of this post is to share with the world, or those parts of it that both visit this humble domain and have not yet seen it, the picture below.
Yes. It’s a bunny. Yes, it’s a giant bunny. Yes, it’s an unfeasibly huge giant bunny. And it’s real. And it’s going to hop off and save the starving North Koreans. But as you can probably tell by the look in its eye the act of salvation requires the ultimate sacrifice, that it give up its life to feed its friend. Or in this case its friend and seven other members of the friend’s family.
An entirely sensible response by the North Korean Government to the current (unacknowledged) pervasive starvation among the population. The rabbit, as I might already have mentioned, is the most efficent [yes, yes, you have already mentioned it] [are you saying I’m boring? I thought I told you to shut up]
Ahem. Anyway. Isn’t that just a great picture? Or is this one even better?
Yes, I like the general helplessness of that one too. I thought at first the rabbit was being held by its ears but given its dimensions I should imagine doing so might cause them to become detached from the rest of the body thus allowing it to escape.
The second reason for this exigesis is to link to one of the many places this story can be found, the English site of Spiegel Online, to check out their whizzy blog-friendly tools, one of which uses Technorati to show all blogs which have linked to the story. So in fact almost the entire effort of putting together this post can be chalked up as work!
One final point, before I hop off to make some lunch, the term lepus is the Latin word for hare, creatures which, as we all know, don’t congregate in large social colonies and don’t live in burrows. The Latin word for rabbit, on the other hand, is cuniculus. Had the makers of Night of the Lepus got their title terminology correct maybe they would have found it easier to get an x rating.
Internettent
Something really weird is wrong with my phone line, and therefore the internet too. Earlier today it gave out completely after several days of the phones ringing like they had laryngitis and having insufficient oomph to connect with the caller when answered.
Now it appears to magically be back again, but for how long I know not. Two days until a phone-line -mending person comes. Two whole working days! Which means after Monday, dammit. Still, there’s the wifi cafĂ© round the corner although staying there for protracted lengths of time means drinking even more coffee than is my habit.
I’m so helpless without the internet. Lost and discombobulated. It took me a good half hour to find the international dialing code for Trinidad in order to phone my colleague by mobile to tell her of my plight.
frizzyLogic 