High Adventure!

And so away as once again I set out upon high-adventure! For the next week, a little less, I’ll be where there is no internet (1926 as it happens) where forging through the deep snows of the Siberian wilderness I’ll be following the map supplied by my peers in the Royal Society. The map is a blank piece of paper with ‘fill in as you go’ written in a tidy script in one corner so all promises well for pulp adventure somewhat far from home.

The Slide will be updated on my return but in the meanwhile feel free to browse. There’s tea in the caddy and muffins by the fire.

New Stonehenge

Exciting plans were revealed today by British Heritage to make a visit to Stonehenge more awe-inspiring we learned today. Complete with a new visitors centre at Airman’s Corner the ancient monument is set to revel in an expansion to the site from being what even to this day is considered by many ‘just some stones in a field’.

I lived right near the henge for a few years, indeed just down and up the hill from Airman’s Corner in the lovely Shrewton. My beloved Q worked there at the same time, and they were happy times indeed what with me enjoying the odd conversation with an adult and once in a while going out. So to top it all I’m going to miss out on the plans that have been sent to me today. These set to change the views I witnessed there by tourists (who having come all the way from Salisbury to view the stones expressed delight in finding out that the stones, were stones, in a field). Whilst until late last century considered to be set there by the Romans, as was anything, ever (bloody Romans) Stonehenge was not as it happened made by aliens. Rather it was raised by people that having only stone to work with were in fact pretty good at it.

Now we are promised hourly dancing girls dressed like Raquel Welch that will catfight before wobbly rubber dinosaurs. Stone sleds will whip people across Wiltshire’s largest planned rollercoaster. Jobbing archaeologists will chase Tony Robinson in a JCB whereupon the hapless drama student standing in for him will be trowled to death for the delight of audiences. There will be beaker-cup rides, re-enactments of local people through the ages swiping bits for their cottages, and the A303 will be wrapped in brown paper for two miles in either direction so as to no longer give away the site of the stones, in a field, for free – and visitors will be invited to kick a hippy in the restored beanfield.

As a finale visitors will view Stonehenge as it was originally - lovingly restored as a landing pad for flying saucers.

I lied about the aliens.

Christmas Science

We found out today what this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures will concern. Further that BBC4 will show them. For the last I am extremely happy as I otherwise nervously scan the bumper Radio Times in December hoping that they’ll actually be shown at all. Because if they’re not to your mind a British institution (they are, it’s in the name, but) then you are wrong. That was very internet of me. For my next trick I will stay up all night scratching myself with green bacon fat because someone I will never meet disagrees with me. With multiple exclamation marks.

This year it’s chemistry. This year that means blowing shit up. I’m all for science demonstrating stuff by blowing it the shit up. If I had my way all science would be converned with blowing things up, shit or otherwise. Probably not biology thinking about it, but that’s not a real science. I did it at school. It was drawing. Science is about maths, which is why I should probably not have seen eye-to-eye to it – especially physics, but which because I had the same physics teacher for five years I enjoyed heartily, all the maths aside. He was a very good teacher (which neatly brings us back to the Christmas Lectures).

There is nothing wrong with taking important subjects and covering them in a way in which children can understand them. Hell, it means grown-ups can enjoy them because no one is an expert on everything. Even that person who I will never meet who ruins all the bacon rind in my house. No matter how many exclamation marks he uses.

My eldest had been watching them for the last two years. Yes, initially it meant staying up after her bedtime but firstly, it’s Christmas. And Christmas is a Big Thing in this house. And secondly, seriously, the Christmas Lectures. She might not follow everything – or not then at age six, but she learned enough. And wanted more. Which is great because she’s convinced that I know everything (and I’m not always that great on stuff normally covered by the Christmas Lectures).

So this year Dr. Peter Wothers is going to blow stuff up.

And if he doesn’t, well that’s all right too. Because I know that he’d like to really.

Roll on Christmas.

The Ghost Of Jayne Mansfield

I first read G. D. Holbourne when I was about thirteen. My ma has more books than anyone. Really, anyone. When she left school and until she was married she worked in the British Museum Library and may well have taken most of it with her when she left. I’ve mentioned the character Martin ‘fucking’ Luther before now and it was one of his that I first read, and have not read since. You can’t find the books anywhere, mostly because apart from a very few rough collections most of them appeared in periodicals in the 50s and 60s.

What stuck with me from that first read was that Martin fucking Luther was haunted by the ghost of Jayne Mansfield. I has no idea then who that was, but she seemed very annoying. And so she was, probably raised by Martin in a previous story and he stuck with her since. I say ‘probably’ because I honestly have no idea, as I’ve not read the story where that happened (or even know if it even exists).

Now I know that Jayne Mansfield was a film starlet famous for her chest, a blonde 50s celebrity of great fame, a regular in Playboy. But at the time the story was written it wasn’t common knowledge that she was also a member of Anton LeVey’s Church of Satan. Perhaps G.D did, or heard such rumours of it, but what is true is that the story was written before her death at age 34. There’s nothing eerie about that. He probably just found her irritating. Certainly in the story she is an unpleasant, unhelpful sort of familiar like some devilish version of Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeanie. The story was probably extremely satirical, but that all went over my head at the time – what I remember is a young magician stuck for the moment with a ghostly, extremely sexual familiar who wouldn’t (despite his best efforts as an aside to the main story) just fuck off.

I don’t have to rely on memory for that last. Martin said ‘fuck’ a lot in every story he appeared in. No one else ever seemed to swear.

And so another quick challenge-sketch. And this time of a devilish, ghostly Jayne Mansfield.

Beach Volleyball Legacy

Beach volleyball received record viewing figures in the wake of the Olympics, internet watchdogs have reported today. The statistics show that repeat viewings through the BBCs Sport iPlayer late at night, when the missus is asleep, have surpassed the best bits from war films and watching The Inbetweeners again. In the all important back-from-the-pub slot the extra slow footage capturing the athletic prowess of one team or another has broken some, or possibly more, records.

So much so that ITV (keen to grab a piece of the pie) has announced a series covering important beach volleyball matches, and in an effort to explain the sport to those new to the game a late night special where they basically do away with a ball altogether. The show set to bring the highlights of the superb sportswomen adjusting their bikini-bottoms, sometimes when they’re signalling to their teammates (but mostly ‘whenever’), is to be presented by Russell Brand. Brand, already said to be excited by his first sporting role, has been whooping and waving his arms like the lead in a rejected 1970s sitcom whilst running around to the Benny Hill theme tune.

‘It’s important that we consider the legacy of the London 2012 Olympics,’ one industry insider has been quoted as saying, ‘Especially the girls jumping about and pulling exerting faces whilst Brand fingers his many medallions with both hands behind his head.’

The show, to be called ‘Tug of War’, is set to arrive in early September.

XXIIth, Act 1, Scene 2

They had nursed the bus along the Old Kent Road but dead in the shadows of London trees it was, at best, a wreck. It was nonetheless a fine sort of bus. A bus of colour (many), and reliability (little). Inevitably it had become the Magic Bus. It had crossed the country many times, by many hands, but for three years under one and that hand the Captain’s. As a man he was much like his bus. Older than others but cheery enough, and so too like the bus he had spent so long travelling no one was entirely sure from where he might have started. Where he had stopped though was the estate, and far from home Vi stretched, and yawned, and frowned at the long blocks that lined either side of the road. They were only a short distance from main roads and roundabouts but a whole world from both.

            “Where are we?” she said.

            The Captain stood as others left the bus. He rolled up a cigarette one-handed. It had taken him weeks to make it look so simple. He said, “The Rockingham.”

            “What the fuck do I do on the Rockingham? My brother’s still stuck back on that site. You think he’s still there?”

            “He’ll have got a lift.”

            Vi hoped so. Twins, she worried about him. Both slim as snakes he looked more girly than she, what with the hair and the pink leather. In contrast in her boots and tatty jumper it was difficult to say at times who was the manlier. Something the Captain had picked at all the day before so that her brother had stormed off. It had been he coming here, and so not doubting he would then here Vi would have to remain. “You think?”

            “Aye, but they might have a surprise coming if they do. Nothing like a toerag’ll give you a ride to sulk when he finds a nice girl is a boy. Nah, he’ll be right.”

            Vi handed over a little towards diesel. She said, “You know this place?”

            “I used to live down Kennington way. Came by not long ago. It’s all right here. Bit fucking arty,” he made to juggle in the air. “Guitars, and readings, and all that shit. Fucking wasters the most of them. Horse is all right though. Bit more go to him.”

            One of the others still sorting through his bag looked up. Of all those that had jumped the bus he was the happiest. He squatted round here and had only gone up to Wiltshire for the weekend.  It could not have worked out better, and feeling that luck should be spread about said, “He’s got a bone on for Livy.”

            The Captain didn’t know the name. It was Vi though who said, “Who’s she?”

            “There’s a load of them live up in this big old house on the edge of the estate. Big old commune thing, they’re all right I suppose. Livy’s sort of the leader they don’t have,” he stood up to shoulder his bag., “Pretty too, proper pretty. Not much for sharing it about either. Not snooty mind, just...” he made a face. “You won’t get in there in case that’s your thinking.”

            “And this Horse is mad for her?”

            The boy nodded, raised a hand and left them alongside the road.

            Vi watched him go. Before he turned into the blocks she bent to go through her own pack. She had a dirty smile on her face. She said, “We’ll see about that. You want to introduce me to this Horse, Captain?”

            The Captain could see no good reason why not.  

June May

G. D. Holbourne’s many stories (most of them short) all tended to revolve about the same milieu and with little care for how they weighed up upon one another. In Kiss Me Quick little happens in the traditional vein. There is only a little conflict and that easily resolved, and the tale takes place entirely upon an unnamed British pleasure beach where a cult to the similarly never-named evil that was victorious some decades before suns itself and lives the life of a jaded Riviera in the height of what was then (the late 60s) provocative and fashionable beach wear. Living on chips and ice cream, whelks and brown ale the cult is never anything other than sunny, delighted and rather looking forward to the end of the world. Indeed, what conflict there is concerns quite why it is taking so long!

There is no Pepper Mint to be broken , dashing and dastardly. Martin Fucking Luther does not arrive to turn their occultist tables upon them. Barney Dunn never once wanders about as the everyman stumbling detective, and Miss π does not scowl at them and ultimately defeat them with the aid of her beatle-cut henchmen. Indeed, no one comes to sort them out and their traditionally cultist ways have become drab. In one memorable scene there is an argument as to whose turn it is to make the weekly sacrifice, since it is such a... chore.

It is the utter ordinariness of the cult that makes Kiss Me Quick so well rendered. Wake up, brush teeth, cut cheek, take a gin-sling on the veranda, kiss an octopus. The cultists very oddities are never presented as anything other than just another descriptive point. Like a hat, or the colour of the hair - and as ever with Holbourne always played very straight.

One for example (and here today’s ten minute sketch), ‘June May was dressed for Port St. Vincent with her hair eight thick ropes, Quant bikini, and snails.’