Autumn Colours

What says "autumn" (or indeed "Bonfire Night") more eloquently than a burnt-out car amid the drifts of leaves on a gloomy late afternoon in November? Or a fly-tipped vacuum cleaner and frying pan in subdued Hallowe'en tones, carefully arranged against a tree?

Or how about this bizarre mash-up of religiosities at our local cemetery, all for a child who died well before his first birthday?

I suppose these trees at Mottisfont Abbey, near Romsey do also have something more conventionally seasonal to say, but we've heard all that before, haven't we? Nice, though, if you're into that sort of thing.

There's some interesting "negative space" action going on in that first one: cropping it square brings it to the foreground, so to speak:

A square crop also worked best with this arboreal wrestling match on Southampton Common:

That's it. A pictorial post of few words, this time, but lots more words coming up soon.

The Bonfires of Yesteryear

If you feel you might have read this one before, you'd be right. I started to write a November the Fifth piece, and the words and phrases were coming suspiciously easily, as if dictated by something or someone – spooky! – and then I realised I was simply recalling a post I'd written some years ago, itself an expansion of one the earliest things I wrote for this blog. So here it is again, lightly edited. Light the blue touch paper, and stand well back...

The Bonfires of Yesteryear

I've always liked Autumn, it's my favourite season. As a child I used to look forward to those first nights after the clocks had gone back an hour, bringing the darkness on to around the time you were heading home from school. There would be an edge of frost and smoke in the air, and you would think, "Bonfire Night is coming soon!" Except that now these early autumn nights are generally mild and wet – very mild and very wet lately – and nobody at all lights a bonfire in their garden on the 5th November. It's not just that a lot of the energy has been drained out of the occasion by Hallowe'en: the very idea of filling the streets with smoke from fires and fireworks belongs to a world that has now passed into history, along with the open-hearth fires in every house in every street with their sooty smoking chimneys, and a morning harvest of cold grey ash to be cleared and dumped.

In the 1950s and 60s, as they had for so many decades previously, the children of every household would have scavenged every scrap of combustible material for miles around to build a bonfire heap at the end of the garden or, where this was impractical, helped to build an enormous communal pyre on any suitable green or wasteland. By 9 o'clock at night on the 5th the smoke would be drifting in thick layers illuminated by fires, flashes, and haloed streetlamps. You could point a torch up, and its clear-cut beam was a stiff, smoky wedge, like an anti-aircraft spotlight. In our town – a New Town largely populated by people cleared from the slums of East London, devastated in the Blitz not so long before – strong memories and emotions were evoked by the sights, smells and sounds. You might say that the War was the invisible guest at everyone's firework party.

Or perhaps, the Wars. The stuffed "guy" that burned on top of everyone's bonfire was Hitler, the Kaiser, Napoleon, Guy Fawkes, the King of Spain, Harald Hardrada, and maybe even Julius Caesar: every bogeyman who had ever chanced his arm against the truculent tribes of these islands. It was a night for telling tales, as rockets crackled and popped overhead, and potatoes baked in the bonfire embers; "swinging the lamp", as my father's generation called it, a naval expression that implied such stories might have acquired a little exaggeration and polish over the years.

There are still fireworks, of course, although nowhere near as many, and there are official public bonfires, but somehow the spirit of it all has been lost; children haven't spent the preceding weeks scouring the woods for sticks, or making a stuffed effigy with a moustachioed paper-maché mask for a face out of an old shirt and trousers, in order to squat beside it and beg small change for fireworks: "A penny for the guy!". The tribal memories are weaker, too. "How I endured the Great House Price Collapse of 1987" or "Tales from Covid Lockdown" are hardly worth swinging a lamp for, compared to hair-raising yarns from the Somme, Dunkirk, or Monte Cassino. Our world seems that bit thinner, more disposable, slightly fake; even the weather no longer lives up to the occasion, and every year the frosts that make the moon shine and the stars glitter seem to come later, if at all, and the equinoctial gales that shake the sticks and conkers down from the trees a little wilder and more unpredictable.

What was originally known as "Gunpowder Treason Day" – but then successively became known as Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night, and now most generally as Fireworks Night – is supposed to be all about remembering – "Remember, remember, the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot!" – but is now almost entirely about pyrotechnic spectacle. What little we do remember of the actual causes of the commemoration has lost practically all of its historical flavour, reflected by those changes in name. I can't speak for the inhabitants of more sectarian cities like, say, Belfast, Liverpool, or Glasgow, but I don't think the original anti-Catholic and royalist element has been particularly prominent in living memory. However, you don't have to be a practising neopagan to think that a bonfire festival at this time of year does have deeper roots and resonances. It is notable that November 5th falls exactly midway between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice, and thus coincides nicely with the Celtic Samhain festival (pronounced "sar-win", obviously...), which is generally marked on 1st November. It is also an unlikely coincidence that practically everything known about that ancient festival seems like a mash-up of Hallowe'en and Bonfire Night, if you substitute turnips for pumpkins and the ritual sacrifice of some scapegoat figure for burning a "guy".

But I will resist this slide into melancholy reflection, or I'll end up thinking about what has happened to Christmas: difficult to avoid, now that the mince pies and Christmas puddings have already been crowding the supermarket shelves since mid-October. I don't think this feeling is merely the reflex nostalgia of a man entering old age. So many of us in the "first world" live with the paradox that the more materially comfortable our lives have become over the years, the more widely Good Things are available to more of us, the less sweet they seem to taste. Like the very wealthy, even we ordinary folk can get bored with the uniform OK-ness of our lives, and look back with something resembling regret to a time when the Good Things were tasted just two or three times a year.

Well, OK, perhaps this is just the reflex nostalgia of a man entering old age, remembering when simple things like oranges, nuts, and even baked potatoes were seasonal treats, and beef and chicken were luxuries, reserved for special occasions, not a cheap staple bought ready-jointed in multi-packs from the supermarket. Nobody in their right mind would want to go back to those smoke-filled streets, unappetising meals, or lives shortened by endless repetitive and unrewarding labour.

I suppose you might justifiably say that this is also a down-market, own-brand, off-the-peg version of nostalgie de la boue, an aristocratic vice in which we can all now afford to indulge. But I prefer to think that I am remembering with pleasure a time when we in Britain were passing out of some very bad times into some very good times, with just enough seasoning of the best of the bad times still surviving to add piquancy to the transition. Years when, for example, for the first time a nasty accident with a bonfire or a firework, however idiotic, led straight to hospital, with all necessary treatment free of charge, and even the poorest could depend on the state for housing and financial support. How miraculous that must have seemed to the pre-War generations, how heady the transformation must have felt, and yet how easily we may be letting it slip away. So, please, let's do everything we can to prevent this precious legacy from fizzling out like yet another wet Bonfire Night.

Have a Nice Rest of Your Day

A nice day

(seen from inside the Courtauld Gallery)

Have you noticed it, too? How "Have a nice day!" has mutated into "Have a nice rest of your [insert time period]!", e.g. "Have a nice rest of your evening!"? I'm hearing it all the time now. The first few times I thought, that's a bit weird, maybe he / she has jumbled up a couple of idioms? (my partner does this all the time), but it has clearly become a thing in its own right, with a more acceptable variant (grammatically, anyway), "Enjoy the rest of your [time period]!".

I do seem to recall that "Have a nice rest of your life..." pre-existed this as a sarcastic brush-off – that odd grammatical wobble between "have a nice" and "rest of" gave it a certain rhetorical force – but this is different; clearly a new, faux-friendly formula: counter staff and checkout operators, for the use of. Perhaps it is mandated by management? It wouldn't surprise me. I even heard it used the other day as a sign-off by a BBC Radio 4 news presenter, who may well have unconsciously borrowed it off the nice young man who sold her a latte that morning. That's the virus-like way these thing spread.

For some reason I find this awkward formula even more annoying than I found "Have a nice day!". I have yet to come up with a snappy rejoinder, situated somewhere on the spectrum between "You, too, babe!" and "Fuck off, you twerp...", but I will, Oscar, I will. Although I suppose an uninflected "Thanks..." might be enough. After all, retail assistants shouldn't be on the receiving end of constant "micro-aggressions" from elderly pedants as they enjoy the rest of a dull spell at the till.

It is possible that this is yet another Americanism imported by the younger generations, along with "can I get" (what, no "please" or "could I have"?) and "Gen Zee" (not "Zed"). Seen from over here, American speech-ways have always had an attractive vivacity to the young, no matter how conventional (or deprecated) they might be back home in the States. Talking of which, I'm currently intrigued by the way Americans say "it's not that big of a [thing e.g. problem]", not (as a Brit would), "it's not that big a [thing e.g. problem]", or perhaps more likely, "It's not such a big [thing e.g. problem]".

So far I have yet to hear or read anyone saying, "It's not that rusty of a car", but I did see today "It's not that scary of a situation", so I wonder if it might have something to do with "expressions of magnitude when relating to abstract nouns"? Would any of you, my esteemed American readers, ever say, for example, "It's not that scary of a dog"? By the same token, would a Brit ever say "It's not that scary a dog?" Probably not? More likely, "It's not such a scary dog"? It may also have something to do with the similar, but subtly different formula "it's not that much of a problem", which we would also say, not to mention "it's one hell of a problem", ditto. The "of" is clearly doing two different sorts of work here, one of which seems oddly superfluous to a British English speaker. Who knows? Someone probably does. Call a linguist!

Anyway, doubtless sooner or later some of us here will start saying it, and insisting that they always have, and that it is correct. See also "bored of" vs. "bored with". Nobody was ever bored of anything when I was a kid, although it's true you might get bored with boring stuff like homework, eventually. I'm not generally a language peever-pedant, though: language is as language does. Or rather, language is as people do it. It's just that some people do it so annoyingly.

What intrigues me is how quickly these speech trends find their way into general usage. Now, for example, nearly everyone interviewed on the radio kicks off by saying, in reply to the first question, "Thank you for having me on the programme!". Which is bizarre, isn't it?, as if BBC Radio 4's Today programme were a children's birthday party. It's not as if they haven't been held on the line or in a side-room, kept warm by some editorial assistant (no, not like that), with plenty of time to have expressed their gratitude for two minutes of fame. Perhaps – here's a thought, BBC – that assistant should warn them, "Please, do not on any account waste valuable airtime by thanking your interviewer, asking after their health, or using any other fashionable throat-clearing phatic noise you may have heard others use!". "Good afternoon, Sarah!" is another one; essentially an implied rebuke to the interviewer's lack of manners, for not having wished them the same (especially if their name is not Sarah). More recently I'm also hearing the deeply patronising reflex response, "That's a great question!", as if a professional radio presenter was just some idiot sitting in the audience who'd unexpectedly put their finger on something important. Well done, you!

Some of these fashionable adoptions enter the language permanently – "gotten" seems to be sneaking back into British English – while others have a very short life. It seems like only yesterday that someone, somewhere came up with "good boy" as a cute synonym for "dog", for example; now it's everywhere. A recent article heading in PetaPixel, for example: "Good Boys and Girls Star in the Dog Photography Awards 2025". But hasn't this already started to seem like a tired cliché? I'm reminded of the rise and fall of "wally" in Britain: I wrote about this way back in 2009, and I see no point in repeating it here. But if you have ever wondered where expressions like "he's a bit of a wally" came from (ah, but which bit?) , then follow the link. All will be revealed.

The rise and fall of such linguistic items reflects the endless churn of the 10,000 things, obviously. Not heard of Dubai chocolate yet? Neither had I. When I did, I thought it was a joke, perhaps some sort of euphemism ("Dammit, I've just stepped in some Dubai chocolate!") or shorthand for a figure of speech ("It melted away like a bar of chocolate in Dubai"). But then neither you nor I are much influenced by influencers, if at all, are we? So let's not even get started on the idiotic "six seven" thing, as I expect that will already be over by the time I get to the end of this sentence, with any luck. Kids, eh?

Then there's talking too much, and much, much too fast in an inaudible croak or mutter... But that's a different post. File under "I'm a tolerant man, but..."

That'll do. So have a nice rest of your web-surfing! Or maybe just have a nice rest. But don't forget to take your good boy out for a walk, you wally. Six-seven!

Walkies! (It's not that scary of a dog...)

Rockers and Poets

Searching...

I was idly scrolling through the streaming services looking for something to watch, when up popped a video of a Bruce Springsteen concert, Live in New York City. So I thought, Why not? I used to enjoy the early Springsteen albums, but never did see him live, and those concerts are legendary. Although "epic" might be a better description: it turned out to be a non-stop three hour and ten minute Boss-athon from 2001, no doubt with some of the more tedious bits edited out. It was exhausting just to watch, even broken over three nights. I mean, crikey, what is that man on? Perhaps they'll tell us in the biopic that's just coming out.

Anyway, Bruce Springsteen... He's everywhere at the moment, presumably because of that forthcoming film. Some love him as a blue-collar, truth-telling rock 'n' roller, others loathe him as a bombastic poseur: in his own words, he has become "a rich man in a poor man's shirt", who has never done a proper day's work in his life. I have to say I was pleased to have confirmed recently what I had always suspected (in a Q&A with Todd Rungren): that the risible "Bat Out Of Hell" by Meat Loaf (actually written by Jim Steinman) was conceived of as an affectionate parody of the early Springsteen's grandiloquent crescendos, histrionic story-telling, and dramatic changes of mood and tempo. This, Springsteen's signature style, is what we in Britain refer to as a "Marmite taste": people who are passionate about their music tend to love it or hate it with equal intensity.

There's more to Springsteen than those famously theatrical rock-outs, of course. Myself, I always admired Nebraska, his solo, Americana-flavoured acoustic album, and also the spikier of the releases of the early 90s, Lucky Town. But it is those first three albums, and in particular The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle, that I know in that intimate, deeply personal way that you absorb and embody the music of your youth. I happen to like Marmite, I suppose.

One of my college playmates, Gerry, occupied a commodious room which tended to function as our recreational space. He had a good stereo, and wide musical tastes. I was passionate about music myself in those days, but I was chauvinistically narrow in my repertoire: if it wasn't British, and ideally released on Island Records, then it was probably just foreign rubbish. It was Gerry who introduced me to the likes of Steely Dan, Little Feat, Can, and Weather Report, and who attempted but failed to turn me on to Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill. Also lurking in his box of LPs was an album with a silly title by some American bloke with a weird name which, for some reason, I always refused to give a hearing. Perhaps it was a case of once bitten, twice shy after the ear-bashing of Escalator. So one evening – this was probably winter 1974 – when we were all lounging around, suitably sedated, he slipped it onto the turntable. I was electrified. I may even have got up and danced, but I may be making that up. Wow! Amazing! Who is this?

Ah, youth...

Music may have been all-important to me then but today, partly due to hearing loss and tinnitus (I suppose I have to blame that early love of loud, live gigs) but also due to a general disengagement, I only very occasionally listen to music. What was an essential part of my younger life – along with thrill-seeking (by any means necessary), protesting (what have you got?), or writing essays and taking exams (my superpower) – has simply not followed me into my later decades. I still like most of the music I loved then, but have not "kept up", either with the later output of my favoured artists, or with whatever the young folk are listening to today. I have never, for example, listened to a single Rolling Stones album since the disappointment of Goats Head Soup in 1973, even though Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers are permanently engraved, note for note, word for word, somewhere on my synapses.

Of course, for anyone born in or around the 1950s (in my case '54, the year the first Fender Stratocaster guitars went on sale) proper rock 'n' roll – think Little Richard, think Chuck Berry, think Jerry Lee Lewis – occupies a level even deeper than those synapses, infused into whatever it is that constitutes a person's soul. For us, all subsequent "popular" music is an edifice built on that solid foundation, itself laid down upon the bedrock of rhythm and blues. As it turned out – and it's a curious connection to make, perhaps – those early Springsteen albums sat very comfortably on what was then a more recent archaeological layer of "my" music, the verbose lyrics and the stop-start, quiet-loud dynamics of Ian Anderson's Jethro Tull.

Yes, reader, I was a teenage Jethro Tull fan, and not ashamed to admit it. If you've never leapt around your bedroom to classic Tull workouts like "My God" or "Locomotive Breath", then you won't really know what I'm talking about. As with the Stones, though, I abandoned Jethro Tull with the release of those tedious, pretentious, prog-style "concept albums" of 1972/3, Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play. I tried to like them, but the tricksy musical formulas had grown stale, the punning wordplay seemed juvenile, and Anderson's trademark modulation from sarcasm to sincerity and back again had passed its use-by date. Above all, as with so many musicians around that time, even the sainted Joni Mitchell, it had all gone rather too "meta", as we would say now; that is, mainly concerned with the travails of success and failure within the music business, and the burdens of fame. I mean, frankly, who cares? I certainly didn't. So Springsteen arrived at just the right time to fill that musical void quite nicely.

I'm not going to write some sort of critique of The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle, other than to say it's one of the most perfect albums I've ever heard. If your idea of Springsteen is dominated by the overheated bluster of "Born to Run", then give "Wild Billy's Circus Story" a listen. If nothing else, it's proof that school dropouts can write poetry. I suppose "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" is the standout track for me, and not just because it arrived in my life when a girl called Sandie had put my emotional life through the wringer.

Sandy, that waitress I was seeing lost her desire for me
I spoke with her last night, she said she won't set herself on fire for me anymore
She worked that joint under the boardwalk, she was always the girl you saw bopping down the beach with the radio
The kids say last night she was dressed like a star in one of them cheap little seaside bars, and I saw her parked with lover boy out on the Kokomo
Did you hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for telling fortunes better than they do
For me this boardwalk life is through, babe
You ought to quit this scene too...
4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

A deeper dive...

I was reading Seamus Perry's review in the TLS of some recent books on Sylvia Plath ("Lioness of God", TLS 6389, October 3 2025). In it, he discusses the challenge of "imaginative overload" in some of Plath's poems in Ariel such as "Daddy" –  in other words, the disproportion between the nut of the subject matter and the sledgehammer poetical means deployed to open it – and he mentions Coleridge's criticism of some of Wordsworth's more overblown poems:

Such characteristic imaginative overload vividly exemplifies, in its own way, the phenomenon that Coleridge observed disapprovingly in some of the poems of Wordsworth. He referred to those passages in which Wordsworth deployed “thoughts and images too great for the subject” as “mental bombast”. It is a complaint about getting things out of proportion, not seeing things in their own right, and the moral edge to the criticism is a charge of self- absorption.

At first this struck me as a very apposite criticism of so much rock song-writing: so many power chords, so much screaming, so little to say. But then it occurred to me that you might equally well say that, unlike Sylvia Plath or Wordsworth, the more earnest rock writers are trying to crack some enormous nuts with a very small hammer. They want to tackle the Big Issues – religion, politics, the meanin' of life, an' that – but are imprisoned in a mode of expression best suited to the concerns of adolescence; excess energy, sex, lack of sex, cars, clothes, and oedipal rage, essentially. It's a stance and a style which can only be looked back on with nostalgia, if and when you have outgrown it – we were all wearing L-plates at the time, after all, just "Learning the Game" – but also with a certain bemusement. I hear the opening bars of "Gimme Shelter" or "Brown Sugar" now and a thrill runs down my ageing spine; but then I hear the lyrics, and I think, Really? Rape, murder, slave markets? What were we thinking? (They still make me want to get up and jump about, though...).

John Keats is perhaps the exemplar of adolescent poetic romanticism: what more sexy teen-dream poem is there than "The Eve of St. Agnes"? But had he lived to, say, my age – he would have been 71 in 1866 – what might he have been writing then, in the year of the completion of the first transatlantic telegraph cable? Those years were something of a turning point in Eng Lit, when morally-serious works like George Eliot's sturdy literary keystone Middlemarch were still being set into the fabric of the Victorian Cathedral of Art, [1] but that edifice was under threat of subsidence by a recent turn to "aestheticism", epitomised by the rather more naughty and indeed Keatsian Poems and Ballads (also of 1866) by the Isle of Wight's prodigal son, Algernon Swinburne. Times had changed since the Regency, and were changing again.

So perhaps Keats would have been the eternal adolescent, a Mick Jagger for his times, an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" living legend, swinging in and out of fashion with the passing years? Or maybe a Springsteen, maturing his work to match his age and the zeitgeist, but still happily confined within the limits of his chosen toolbox? Or  – just imagine – might he have produced a late style to compare with Goethe, Turner, or even Shakespeare?

We'll never know, of course. He was just 25 when he died: like Shelley, dead at 29, nearly but not quite a founder member of the 27 Club. But we do have the example of so many poets and rockers who also arrived like blazing youthful comets but then, having failed to die young, went on to leave behind them a long, dusty tail of mediocrity. So perhaps Keats was prescient: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter..."

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
from his Ode on a Grecian Urn

A bit sappy, perhaps, but not bad for a kid, really. Rock on, John.

Canned Keats

1. Or indeed Hesba Stretton's Jessica's First Prayer. I know, who?, but apparently she sold one and a half million copies of this evangelical tosh... 

Resilience

I've never been one of those extroverted types who feel the need for a whole galaxy of friends, spread across a wide spectrum from soul-mate to nodding acquaintance. My Christmas card and calendar lists are fairly short – exclusive, even, you might say – and my birthday card list is even shorter, pretty much restricted to family and a handful of my closest friends. Add to those my email "address book" – not a lot bigger – and I'm pretty much in touch with everybody I want to be in touch with, from my oldest friends, dating back to my school and university years, to a few ex-colleagues and those I have met – whether IRL ("in real life") or electronically – through my blogging and creative endeavours.

That "pretty much" is definitely a grey area, however. It's small, and populated by a handful of off-grid, uncontactable people – possibly still out there, possibly not – that I once knew and am still curious about. I think of them as interrupted, unfinished conversations that could still be worth having, if the opportunity were to arise. Some have gone silent in recent years, some I have not heard from or even about for four, five decades. They may be dead, on the run from the law, or just assiduously minding their own business.

From time to time something will arouse my curiosity about one of them, and in an idle minute at the keyboard I might feel like searching them out on the Web. However, this always feels a little bit creepy to me – after all, if they had wanted to get back in touch I'm not exactly hard to find – so I generally resist the urge and, on those occasions when I have succumbed, have never yet actually attempted to contact anyone I did manage to find. Although, in fact, it's surprising how few of them have left any trace at all on the internet, which takes quite some effort these days. Besides, at our age – early 70s and older – you really don't know who or what you might find. Which, when I think about it, is probably the reason why they may never have got back in touch with me, either. Time takes its toll, and some things are best left in the past where they belong.

After my old schoolfriend Tony Collman died in February last year, I passed on the news to the very few people who might care one way or the other (Tony had done his best to alienate everyone he had ever known). One of these was another old classmate, Ian Cropton, who, like Tony, had returned to our home town of Stevenage in his latter years; in Ian's case to care for his ageing father. I was disappointed but not entirely surprised not to get a reply to my email: I knew that the two of them had "fallen out", as we say. It was inevitable: Tony's talent for destroying friendships was truly world class. I also knew that Ian was suffering ill health himself, and had since retreated into a fragile, monk-like existence in Colchester.

After I'd heard nothing at all from him for eighteen months, it seemed that Ian might have moved into that grey area of lapsed contacts, so in the summer I thought I'd better look him up, only to discover that he had died in April 2025. Again, I was saddened but not entirely surprised. Sometimes it can feel that the swish of the Reaper's scythe is getting uncomfortably close. But, as I say, at our age...

Ian came to mind again recently when I read an ex-colleague's blog post about a road accident he had witnessed as a child, in which another child had been hit by a car when walking to school. It reminded me that, after he had got back in touch a few years ago and we were sporadically emailing each other, Ian had told me a very similar story about his walk to school in 1963, with the difference that the child seen lying dead beneath the car was his own younger brother, Malcolm, just seven years old. He was understandably haunted by this tragedy for the rest of his life, although it was something he had never mentioned – not even indirectly – in all the years I had known him at secondary school. How far a person is formed by such an extreme early trauma it is impossible to say – the lad I knew was a gentle soul with a lugubrious personality and a slightly pessimistic outlook, who later went by the self-deprecating internet tag of "Eeyorn" – but as a foundational story it did seem to make sense of a lot of things about Ian and his stop-start life.

It goes without saying that too many young lives in places like Gaza and Sudan are being impacted and quite likely distorted into unpredictable shapes every day by events like this, in tragically large numbers, and for unacceptable reasons. Nobody, and certainly no child, can witness the loss of brothers, sisters and parents in the bewildering chaos of bombardment and military invasion and come away unchanged. But people are resilient. Human history is a history of ineradicable, cockroach-like persistence through untold plagues, wars, and famines: we are all the descendants of survivors. The fragile triumph of "western" civilisation is that we are less likely to be subjected to these things than at any other time in the history of our species. So much so, that it can seem that we now experience a perverse, atavistic hunger for life-haunting memories, preferably of rather less traumatic intensity, and ideally experienced vicariously. Which is where art and entertainment step in.

Horror films and violent thrillers are the obvious examples. The body count in a two-hour cinematic diversion can be off the scale: see my (light-hearted) post A New Union calling for the typically nameless victims of movie massacres to organise as the Amalgamated Representatives of Guards and Henchfolk (a.k.a. ARGH). But dramatised dread will seek you out, uninvited and unasked, whatever your age. I was terrified by the volcano-dwelling "goons" in the Popeye cartoons, and the dreams of a lot of children of my age were disturbed by watching the early years of the TV series Doctor Who, and in particular by those relentlessly psychotic aliens, the Daleks: Destro-oy! Exte-ermina-ate! In fact, those tea-time episodes of the mid-1960s, best experienced by peeping from behind the impenetrable safety-barrier of the sofa, had an unsettling family resemblance to that pioneering BBC sci-fi horror of the 1950s, Quatermass, which my parents would watch after my sister and I were safely asleep in bed.

And yet somehow something of the essence of Quatermass still seeped into my subconscious mind: I suppose horrified shouts and screams on the TV have a way of making their way upstairs and penetrating the sleeping brain, like some marauding extraterrestrial creature. I'm sure I can't have been the only one to have watched the film Alien twenty years later with a mounting sense of a familiar dread: no, not you again... An ersatz, self-imposed, first-world terror, no doubt, but no less real for that. Then, the very next year, as a Jack Nicholson fan and against my better judgement, I saw The Shining, which scared me into white-knuckle rigidity, I have to confess: I vowed "no more horror films for me" after that.

Not least because I had seen it at an afternoon screening before, as a junior assistant at Bristol University Library, doing a solo evening duty at the Law Library situated within the university's imposing Wills Memorial Building. This was a mistake. At the end of that winter's evening session my job was to close up the library, nerves still thoroughly jangled, by turning out all the lights one by one in each room until it was perfectly dark, then lock up the door behind me, still inside a gothic cathedral of a building that would make a perfect setting for a Hammer Horror vampire movie. I pretty much ran out of there.

So that was at least one promise to myself I have kept: I haven't watched another self-declared horror film in the subsequent forty-five years. And yet, as if to illustrate something about our incremental generational resilience – might there be some sort of inherited inoculation against bad experiences? – horror films are my film-buff daughter's favourite genre, the grislier the better. Go figure, as they say.

But, perhaps there is hope that one day there will be a world in which future generations everywhere can enjoy the thrill of scaring themselves silly with fake horrors that sublimate things their ancestors had to suffer in real life. It could happen, and – please, you princes, potentates, presidents, and prime ministers – make it be soon. Sadly, a sofa offers no protection at all against bombs, bullets, or soldiers bent on mayhem.

A linocut I made in 1980...

Wildlife Documentary

We were at our Bristol flat over the weekend, which has a rather spectacular view from the main kitchen window across the Avon Gorge to Leigh Woods, as seen above. As you can imagine, it's very easy to spend a long time gazing out at it, taking the occasional photograph as the elements of the scene compose and recompose themselves, and the sun makes its way from left to right. You'd have to walk a long way to come across such a viewpoint, and at inconvenient hours, so to be able to stumble out of the bedroom to make a pot of tea, in nothing more outdoorsy than a pair of slippers, in order to witness the dawn mists clearing as the sun rises is a real privilege. Sometimes I get a satisfying shot, sometimes I don't. Like any landscape, its attraction depends on the light, the time of day, and the weather. Photographically, it also depends on feeling inclined to open the window: those reflections (not to mention the slightly grubby double glazing) can be a nuisance.

However, our kitchen has two windows. The other is smaller, and faces west, past some neighbouring blocks of flats. This view is rather less spectacular, but comes into its own when – as often seems to happen – there is some eye-catchingly luminous sunset going on outside, as in the picture below.

I grabbed this shot with my phone whilst cooking: it's not a great picture, but I liked the way the light was catching on the balconies of the next block. I had to turn off the kitchen lights to avoid internal reflections and to get the exposure balance right. With a bit more work it could be improved, especially as the kitchen clutter and angled window frame help to defuse the conventional prettiness of the sunset somewhat. But I have included this picture here not so much for any picturesque qualities as for documentary evidence. I simply want you to ignore the aerial fireworks and get an impression of the building opposite.

Why? Because the very next morning my eye was caught by some movement on that same wall, between the third and second storey windows. Incredibly, a squirrel was climbing down the vertical brickwork, thirty feet above the ground, with nothing more to hold onto beyond the texture of the bricks and the mortared pointing in between. I snatched up my camera, put on a long zoom, and took some pictures through the window. Again, this is a case of the documentary function of photography winning out over any aesthetic value: I just wanted to share what that crazy squirrel was doing.

It was clearly intent on getting its face right into the recess above the window, and was gradually working its way across from left to right. Again, why? Was it casing the joint for a break-in?

Well, the main reason I hadn't been opening the window this weekend was that we were being swarmed by a cloud of some kind of fruit fly outside. I'd never seen anything like it before. It's likely, I suppose, that this unwelcome over-abundance is a by-product of the "mast year" we've been having. That, or some one has left a bag of melons to decay into deliquescence out on their balcony. [1] Whatever the reason, dozens of these tiny flies were constantly landing on our windows, and nearly all of them would then steadily crawl upwards, presumably to find shelter beneath the brick overhang. So I can only imagine that squirrels have a liking for them – perhaps they taste of fruit, or even fruit fermented into alcohol? I wasn't prepared to find out for myself – such that it was worth the risk of free-climbing a high brick wall to get at them. Certainly, a couple of wasps were also having a great time repeatedly landing on our window and grabbing up a mouthful.

Meanwhile, down at ground level autumn begins to work its seasonal magic. Yes, yes, autumn leaves... But a certain amount of conventional prettiness is always acceptable, I think. No defusing necessary. Not until it becomes as overwhelmingly kitsch as a gaudy sunset, anyway.

1. A good opportunity to remind you of the words of that great philosopher, Marx: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana..."

A Mast Year

Until someone mentioned it on the radio recently, I had never come across the expression "a mast year" before. I doubt many people had. I knew the word "mast", but only in the context of "beech mast", which I had understood to mean the crap littered on the ground beneath beech trees, which is usually just a lot of of empty seed cases plus a few of the nuts, which are tiny, undernourished-looking things and incredibly bitter, although if you were desperate they could probably be cooked up into something marginally edible. Squirrels and birds seem to like them, though, and they're welcome.

But a mast year is apparently one in which the yield of all wild fruits and nuts is unusually abundant, and this has certainly been the case in Britain. In fact, I don't remember ever seeing anything quite like it before. Every tree and bush is exploding with whatever berries, seeds, or nuts it would normally put forth in autumn in far more modest quantities. Oak trees in particular are carpeting our pavements and roadsides with drifts of acorns that get ground into a mix of shell fragments and acorn flour as they are trodden underfoot and crushed by parking cars. Inexplicably, we haven't allowed pigs to roam free in our streets for several hundred years – and what a good solution to speeding traffic that could be – so, apart from the ones that get carted off by squirrels, they go uneaten.

We were walking in Spearywell Wood (near Mottisfont, near Romsey, near Southampton...), crunching our way through the carpet of acorns, when we came to a large sweet chestnut tree (Castanea sativa [1]) beside the path. The ground beneath it was strewn with its seed cases, densely covered in long needle-sharp spines, but all bursting open to reveal a cluster of fat and glossy-brown chestnuts. Now, it bears repeating that the nuts of the sweet chestnut – edible and delicious – are a very different proposition to those of the horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) whose similar looking nuts, a.k.a. conkers in Britain, are toxic. These, too, are lying around everywhere, something that in my childhood would have been inconceivable: conkers were gathered up as soon as they began to fall by children, in order to play the game of the same name, something now relegated to folklore by electronic devices and health and safety concerns, along with the likes of chain-he in the school playground [2], hopscotch, skipping-rope games, and all the other entertainments and pastimes of my youth.

Why, kids under 18 today can't even buy fireworks, let alone pop a few bangers inside a neighbour's dustbin to watch the lid blow off, as bangers themselves (firecrackers) are now illegal in the UK, and setting off any fireworks in the street is against the law. As that rascal Raoul Vaneigem almost said, "Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not blow a few fingers off has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom".

Anyway, stumbling across this natural bounty brought out our hunter-gatherer instincts. I always keep a plastic carrier-bag folded away within my canvas shoulder-bag – you never know when one might come in handy – so we were able to scoop up a large quantity of them. We could easily have filled the bag, but this would have been impractically heavy and, besides, you can only eat so many chestnuts. As we gathered them from underneath the tree, more were falling around us with a solid thud. Luckily we didn't get hit, which would have been like being struck with a mace by some invisible fairy knight, or perhaps by a freefalling hedgehog whose parachute had failed to open.

Handling chestnuts reminds me that when I was a child in Stevenage we always used to spend Boxing Day (December 26th) at the house of my godparents, "auntie" Win and "uncle" Les, who lived nearby and were classic new-towners: East Enders who had left war-ravaged London for a better life in north Hertfordshire. We were close – they had lived in the flat below the one I was born in – but it's hard to exaggerate the utter tedium back then of being on your Sunday-best behaviour – seen but not heard – on days when everything was shut and the weather was too bad to play outside. Worse, if there were no children around close to your own age – Win and Les's daughter was the same age as my sister, eight years older than me – you had to sit quietly somewhere entertaining yourself as best you could, exiled from your new toys back at home. However, there was always a good supply of nuts on hand at their house, so I'd while away the hours with a nutcracker, investigating and improving my technique opening hazel nuts, brazil nuts, almonds, walnuts, and – something we never had at home – sweet chestnuts.

In those years following the end of post-war rationing pretty much everything was seasonal: even oranges only appeared in the shops in winter. Similarly, chestnuts were imported from France and Italy for a brief period around Christmas, and were something of a luxury. These imported chestnuts were sweet, even uncooked, and it was an interesting challenge to open the flexible shell and then remove the unpleasant inner husk without breaking the tasty kernel into tiny pieces. Perhaps not as engaging as Super Mario on a Game Boy but, as we old Boxing Day survivors always like to say, you made your own entertainment in those days. The sweet chewiness of the raw chestnut was the reward for much squeezing, peeling, and flaking away. A slight stomach ache from too much tannin was the price you paid.

So the first thing I did with our haul from Spearywell Wood was to cut one nut in half, extract a small piece, and taste it. To my amazement it was utterly revolting; so tongue-shrivellingly bitter I had to spit it out and rinse my mouth with water. This was true durian territory. Which was a bit of an unexpected blow, obviously. But a little web-surfing convinced me it would still be worth roasting them, so I took a few and did as instructed: I cut an incised cross into the rounded side, soaked them in water for an hour or two, then gave them 20-30 minutes in the oven. They turned out fine: all bitterness had gone, and they were perfectly edible.

Talking of seasonal vegetables and chestnuts, here's a recipe you might like to try which transforms brussels sprouts from a chore – eat your greens or there's no pudding for you! – into something that even those who claim to hate the things might enjoy.

You will need:

Brussels (about six per person)
Pack of pre-cooked whole chestnuts, available all year round (if you don't have any I've also used unsalted cashews, walnuts, or almonds)
Lardons (pancetta or bacon)
Butter or margarine
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Trim the outer leaves from the brussels, so that you have a tight, fresh-looking core. With a sharp knife cut each in half lengthways, then cut each half again lengthways: you should have something resembling the segments of an orange. I actually tend to get fancy with the knifework and cut each half into three segments. The less they look like brussels the better.

Take the chestnuts – about half the number of brussels – and either slice them or dice them into small pieces. If using other nuts you'll need quite a few more, obviously, and these are best roughly chopped. Attempting to slice cashews, in particular, is a quick route to despair, as bits will ping all over the kitchen.

Heat some olive oil in a frying pan, and melt in some butter or marge.

Add some lardons to the pan – not too many, just enough to flavour the mix – and fry until they start to colour up, then add the brussels and the nuts, plus salt and pepper "to taste", as the recipe books always say. Stir fry the whole lot over a moderate heat until cooked: the brussels will have started to brown.

If the end result is a bit too oily, tip them out onto a double sheet of kitchen towel on a plate before serving. They go well with any roast, whether a Christmas goose or a joint of meat at the weekend, or even just a couple of sausages and a baked potato. Hmm, suddenly I'm feeling very hungry.

The phases of the sprout...

1. Readers of a certain inclination may be struck by the rather familiar second (species) part of that binomial scientific name. In fact, "sativa" is quite common (rice, for example, is Oryza sativa): it simply means "cultivated", an adjective derived from "sat-", being the passive perfect participle stem of the verb serō, “I sow or plant”. But you knew that.

2. An accident-prone variant of the game we knew as "he" or "it", but more widely known as "tag". I doubt very much that schoolchildren are allowed to play it at all, now, much less parade around the playground chanting "Olly, olly in, fer chainy!" (translation: I say, fellows, who wants to play chain-he?"). Ip dip, sky blue, who's It? Not you!

Reading Writing

I recently met up with an old friend – a house-mate and partner in crime from my university days – to see the Kiefer / Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy. Although, to be honest, in these early days of my eighth decade, I'm more and more regarding such gallery-going as an occasion for a catch-up chat over coffee with old friends in a mutually convenient and congenial environment: I've got another one coming up in a couple of weeks at the National Gallery. The actual exhibitions are great, of course, but a bit of face-time with old friends (friend-time with old faces?) is what makes a trip to London worth the effort and expense. In fact, a couple of times the conversation has been of such intensity / profundity / hilarity that we've actually skipped the show, and just bought more coffee.

Anyway, this particular friend is one of those admirable people who have continued to top up their cultural capital, way beyond those early years when deposits into the culture bank seemed to offer some kind of advantage in the material world, even if only to add lustre to one's small talk. No seriously ambitious person wants to be wrong-footed when the conversation turns to, say, Schubert or Seinfeld. But the payments most people make into their cultural investment schemes seem to fall off rapidly as the immediate worldly benefits decline. After all, if your ambitious life-plan has worked out well for you, then you're now the one leading the small talk, and if what you really want to go on about is house prices or comparative EV mileages, then so be it. Fuck Schubert.

This continuing cultural investment is something I and my friends tend to have in common, naturally. Not everyone would choose Anselm Kiefer's grandiose exorcisms of the guilt of Nazi Germany as a suitable venue for a little Kaffeeklatsch, I'm sure. But we – and, I trust, you – have simply never felt like cashing out, culturally. Unlike me, this old friend did not study literature at university but, perhaps for that very reason, has persisted in the view that the Great Books are not just something you read for examination purposes. So, as a committed, lifelong reader of the Serious Stuff, he has always been keen to share his latest literary adventures with me; I am supposed to be a credentialled littérateur, after all.

However, this time I had finally to admit that, to put it bluntly, I really don't read much self-declared or critically-endorsed "literary" fiction any more. I could tell from his reaction that this was as if I had said that, all things considered, that Farage bloke is talking a lot of sense. But it's true. I do still read, obviously – I'm currently reading Sally Mann's Art Work (isn't everyone?), and before that I was dipping in and out of various translations of Rilke's Duino Elegies – compare and contrast! – but, apart from light reading like the latest "Slow Horses" offering from Mick Herron, I can't actually remember the last serious novel I read.

Why not? Well, I never did read much fiction, even in my peak literary days – poetry was always much more my thing – but the simple fact is that my cultural interests have changed: I'm primarily a visual arts person these days. The vast majority of the (still too many) books I buy are photographic and art monographs (we never use the insulting term "coffee-table book" around here, and neither should you); books in which I mainly pore over the pictures, and barely skim the texts. In my own way I have also come to see myself as a very minor player in that scene; after all, I do make a lot of pictures, photograph obsessively, and occasionally exhibit and sell my work.

I did once try to see myself as a writer, it's true. I wrote and submitted some stories, poems, and even a couple of radio plays, none of which (thankfully) were ever published. I found it was tougher going than I'd anticipated, getting those words out of my head and onto paper, and about as rewarding as doing a nightly bout of school homework. Rather, it was the doodles and sketches I was making in the margins as I ground out the writing that came most easily and compellingly to me, and once I had allowed myself to acknowledge this, my creative output was unleashed. I could never have made a living as an artist – who does? – but I've had an awful lot of fun pretending to be one. In fact, I suspect that to be an "advanced amateur" is the key to happily unpressured participation in any cultural scene. [1]

But, on the subject of reading matter, do you find you need something to read when seated for a spell on the ceramic amplifier in the smallest studio, so to speak? Ideally, a durably-bound book that will open flat in your lap, can resist awkward, often single-handed handling, and which contains a large number of short, self-contained pieces of sparkling wit and insight, each consumable in a concentrated five to ten minutes? If so, my perfect toilet companion (my sede mecum?) for some while now has been a hardback copy of Geoff Dyer's See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. It's a collection of his analyses of about fifty individual photographs, from Atget to Mike Brodie via Luigi Ghirri; generally just three or four pages about each image, nicely reproduced on glossy paper (pretty much waterproof and wipe-clean, too), and written in a distinctly non-academic style, most of which pull off the trick of being both entertaining as well as deeply insightful into what makes a good photograph tick. Highly recommended, and far better than anything you'll find made and marketed as a dedicated "bathroom read" (although I will make an exception for Bill Duncan's The Wee Book of Calvin, of which more in another post). [2]

As it happens, my copy of See/Saw is signed, but on an adhesive insert stuck onto the title page, the book having been published in the plague year of 2021 and therefore, like most books which were "signed" during that strange interlude, never actually handled by the author. Which, given the situation at the time must have seemed appropriately prophylactic, but it really does look like shit, doesn't it?

1. Here I am writing this blog, for example: over 2,000 posts since 2008. But this is a lot of fun, too, and nothing like doing my homework. I enjoy the liberty of an advanced amateur; thinking globally (well, maybe), but writing locally. It would be very different, though, if I were asking for money in exchange – you wouldn't be bothering to read this, for a start – or if I found myself under pressure to deliver an entertaining weekly column in a national newspaper. I have immense respect and not a little envy for the likes of the Guardian's Marina Hyde or Tim Dowling, but would I want their job? No thanks!

2. If you don't know Geoff Dyer's work, he's something of an eccentric polymath, who has written regular fiction but has mainly produced a whole series of unclassifiable works of essayistic encounters with literature, art, photography and film, plus travel and autobiography, often with truly daft titles. I first came across him when I was at a conference in Dublin in 1995 and in a bookshop there saw a pile of remaindered copies of The Missing of the Somme. I bought one – WW1 has long been an interest of mine – and was immediately taken by Dyer's style and ability to take a sideways look at the war's legacy as memory, and as memorialisation. I've not read everything of his, but I'm a fan: in many ways (check his biography) he is the writer I once thought I might become.

New Words

I recently heard a handy word on the radio: wackaging. It's a new one on me, but perhaps not to you, as it's clearly been around for at least a decade, and was allegedly coined by Guardian journalist Rebecca Nicholson. It means:

"Wackaging" or wacky packaging, refers to the increasingly overly familiar, infantilised copy that’s become ubiquitous ever since Innocent adopted a wacky and distinctive tone of voice on their packaging in 2000.

It really is everywhere now, isn't it? An insistent mateyness coupled with a toe-curling cutesiness, as if some hipsterish cuddly toys had taken over the marketing and labelling of everything from biscuits to the toilet lids on South Western trains. No, really:

image: objective ingenuity

I have to read this silly babble every time I go up to London, and stand for a pee in front of it, swaying perilously in every direction as the train rocks and rolls over the rails. But, there, look, I've done it myself: "pee" is surely nothing more than baby talk for "piss", not forgetting its more malodorous cousin, "poo".

Baby talk or no, to openly declare your intention of going for a pee or a poo in most company would still come across as oddly "unfiltered", although to go full-on technical with talk of urination or defecation instead would be downright weird. Some things are eternally unmentionable, it seems, with the result that there have been many ways of politely expressing the need without being over-specific. Quite a few of these have disappeared: the need to "powder one's nose" (nothing to do with cocaine), or "spend a penny" (a reference to public-toilet cubicles that used to be coin-operated) and so on were all frequently-heard expressions in my childhood, readily understood, but now obsolete. Rather like that all-purpose brush-off, "Going to see a man about a dog" (as a response to the question, "Where are you going?"), which I also haven't heard for decades.

People have always tiptoed around the sensibilities of the innocent or the prudish, of course, but the rise of baby talk as polite talk seems a backwards step to me. This can get truly weird in the doctor's surgery. At some point, for example, the cutesy, infantile "tummy" seems to have become the normal word for "stomach". Is there really some sense in which "stomach", or even "belly", are inappropriate terms between adults? I suppose doctors will always have had a particular problem with what linguists call "register". They, of course, have a complete set of precise medical vocabulary which is often utterly incomprehensible to the typical patient, being based on an understanding of Latin and Greek. So compromises have always needed to be found, not least when referring to anything "down there" – problems with "the waterworks" and the like – but finding a suitable middle-ground can be tricky. [1] 

This is particularly the case when – as is so often the case in the NHS today – a medic's first language is not English. No matter how fluent, they will not have acquired the full set of appropriate euphemisms, or a native speaker's confidence in which are and which are not acceptable in polite company, so tend to fall back on the unambiguous trade-talk of med school. I was recently delighted to learn the word "flatus", for example, as a technical term for a fart, and was thoroughly confused when the same doctor, prodding what turned out to be a small umbilical hernia, pronounced that, yes, it did seem to be viscous, i.e. (in my non-medical vocabulary) "having a thick, sticky consistency between solid and liquid". Say what, doc? But the word he used was actually "viscus", i.e. innards of any description, for which there seems to be no baby-babble term. Tummy stuffing, maybe? This is unsurprising, I suppose, as our inner organs are rarely on display or the subject of non-specialist discussion, and when they are the circumstances are never particularly cosy. A little Latin can be a useful sedative.

Oh, stop it, Oatly...

To get back to wackaging, though. The desire and pursuit of cosiness is clearly one of its underlying motivations: advertising copy writers and packaging designers want us to associate warm feelings with a product. So if your image of Happy Times is to be curled up on a sofa cradling a cup of hot chocolate in your fleecy onesie – quite possibly accompanied by a talking cat – then I'm afraid to say that you have been wackaged. Or, worse, you may even be a cause of wackaging.

Some wackiness is de rigueur, too, obviously: there's no end of baffling, hallucinatory goings-on filling up the ad breaks. It's entertaining, sure, but can you figure out or remember from one break to the next what exactly was being advertised? Car insurance? Chocolate? LSD or ketamine, perhaps? Never has so much "creative" effort been lavished so profligately on so little (unless you take a very hard line on the religiosity of Renaissance art). But the more insidious motivation, I think, is the attempt to endow a product with a personality. Not just any personality, of course – coldly aloof, psychotically cruel, or pathetically needy wouldn't do – but something relatable, or – in another word currently in vogue, and not unconnected to the fashion for wackaging – adorable. Which is to say, like a particularly winsome toddler.

We could blame the Japanese for this, with their cult of cute, a.k.a. kawaii. But we've been doing this to ourselves forever without any foreign help, thank you very much. Or some of us have, anyway. The trouble starts when you take perfectly serviceable words and give them the infantilising makeover. I have always recoiled from any talk between consenting adults that involves emetically hypocoristic items like "choccy" (chocolate) or "biccies" (biscuits). I'm with Dorothy Parker here:

And it is that word "hummy," my darlings, that marks the first place in "The House at Pooh Corner" at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

(Parker's Constant Reader column, New Yorker, October 12, 1928)

True, to be repelled by soppiness in all its manifestations may be a side effect of the masculinisation process I and most boys underwent in the 1950s. I must have mentioned, for example, how my grandfather used to throw worms at me in the garden, having learned that I was afraid of them ("Only girls are afraid of worms!"). But you surely don't have to be some spartanised male to want to punch anyone who refers to Christmas as – argh! – "Crimble", or to their drooling, overweight lapdog as their "baby"?

So, I hope you, too, will feel able to resist these cynical attempts to turn the world into an episode of the Teletubbies. Just stop it, Oatly: you are not my adorably wacky bestie, you are a carton of oat milk. In fact, you are not a "you" at all, you are an "it"; please take a step back or I'll ... I'll buy something else, something with a little more dignity.

BTW, if "hypocoristic" isn't a new word to you, too, then congratulations (what, you didn't look it up?). I found it, used it, and will probably have forgotten it within a week... You're welcome.

Just fuck offibobble, EE...

1. Doctors themselves seem to have a problem with their more tongue-twisting medical vocabulary. Sadly, I notice that "ear, nose, and throat" (ENT) has almost completely ousted the wonderfully obscure "otorhinolaryngology" (ORL) as a medical speciality.