What That E Is For

One of the symbols of nationhood is a currency. For this reason it is given a name which represents that country to the world in the same way a flag and embassy do. The Bulgarian currency is called the Lev because the word means "Lion" which is a symbol of strength and majesty. The American currency is the Dollar because that is the American spelling of "dolour" which is an accurate description of the condition of wealthy American tourists who seem incapable of openly enjoying their travels. The independent Portuguese currency was the Escudo because Portuguese think their country is both precious and stylish. The currency betokens the fact that when asked to describe Portugal inhabitants are supposed to say "es cute, no?"

It is therefore a wonder why the British currency is called Sterling. This word seems to have no other meaning and bear no relation to anything. What is this word supposed to convey to everyone else about the nature of the United Kingdom?

The term "Sterling" was first coined after the Battle of Flodden between England and Scotland on 9th September 1513. As was usual in those days the victorious English armies went round looting the bodies of defeated soldiers for any valuables they could find. As a great number of Scottish nobles were slain there were rich pickings for the English soldiers who found large quantities of Scottish coins on the persons of the nobles. Obviously being Scots they would not put it in banks and therefore pay interest. The capital of Scotland at the time was Stirling and these unfamiliar coins became known as "Sterling currency". The substitution of an e for an i in the name of Stirling was not simply a variant spelling but a wilful anglicisation of the name to demonstrate that the capital and its products would henceforth be under English control. This Sterling currency had no value in England because exchange rates had not been invented but it was a status symbol for an Englishmen to be in possession of it. It demonstrated that he had fought at Flodden or knew someone who had and therefore rescued England from eternal reliance on porridge even if only for three hundred and fifty years or so.

Previously the English currency was known as the Pound. This was a reference to the way it was made by bashing it repeatedly into its die marks. Using the term symbolised the fact that the English saw themelves as a hard working and powerful people who created wealth with the labour of their hands rather than barter and trickery. The British currency is still popularly known as the Pound but it is clearly stated on the notes that is the Pound "Sterling". This signifies that the subjugation of Scotland was regarded as the just product of the labour and innate quality of Englishmen. This need to claim identity through imperialism has been the staple of British international relations for centuries and is the cause of many of the problems of readjustment we have today.

At first this Sterling currency was just as valueless elsewhere as it was in England. If you were a Scot you could use it to pay for the colours imported into your wet and miserable landscape and you could accept it as payment for your exports of live haggis and distilled bagpipe spit. If you were English no one would accept it from your hands as no prices were calculated in it. It was the Tsar of Russia who finally gave Sterling coins a value in England. He famously declared war on Scotland and England separately and then signed separate peace treaties with both countries with the result that the transferred Berwick-upon-Tweed remained officially at war with Russia. Understanding the joke local traders offered him Sterling coins with which to hire local guides who could show his armies how to conquer the town. Not wishing to admit his embarrassment the Tsar accepted the payment although he soon forgot about Berwick. With such a powerful ruler accepting Sterling the others could not avoid accepting it too and the Pound Sterling thus replaced the ordinary Pound as the English medium of international trade.

In time people forgot that Scotland had ever had its own coins and the pound Sterling was regarded as an English invention imposed on them after the union of crowns. It is fair to say that international confidence in Sterling was always high as its message of tough people absorbing the cultures of others was one which went down well in the age of great Empires. Indeed it was not seriously threatened until the Welsh infiltrated the British Treasury department. Welshmen were not often allowed to be Chancellor of the Exchequer but neutered ones were given government jobs as people who cannot find any other work often are. A few found their way into the Treasury and bought their families over. Soon there was a veritable colony of Welshmen living there. No one bothered overmuch. Few realised then that this represented the greatest threat to Sterling since its invention over four hundred years earlier.

Once the British budget was top secret. As late as the 1950s the Chancellor was sacked if he revealed any details of it to anyone. Then in the 1960s a profound change occurred. Finance experts would appear on TV giving details of what they thought would be in the budget and commenting on them. Their predictions often turned out to be disturbingly accurate. Of course they were. The finance experts had been receiving the first of the now common Budget Leeks. The Welsh had never had a currency of their own. Now they were undermining the British one by replacing it with specially printed leeks which conveyed the true value of everything the Chancellor was trying to tell us was worth more. This alerted a few Scots to the origin of the British currency itself. Immediately the Royal Bank of Scotland claimed to be the rightful owner of all Sterling anywhere. The British government which had allowed Gallic placenames to be reintroduced and Scottish symbols to be put on pound coins could not argue. In 2004 the Royal Bank of Scotland was made the legitimate owner of all Sterling on the condition that it used its threat of porridge to ensure that the U.K. never adopted the Euro. If all European nations were equal the currency would never survive. How could it defend itself against the Bulgarian lion or avoid being overstamped by the French Franc?

The currency is still called Sterling. It represents the United Kingdom's shame at its imperial past and the subsequent capitulation of the English to its absorbed partners. Is this really such a bad image? It is after all legal, decent, honest and truthful. It demonstrates that we cannot compete with our neighbours. But as the martial artists of the East have so often demonstrated only through purity and humility can any victory be ultimately achieved.

The Modern Version For Modern Man

One of the literary phrases which has entered the common language is Grub Street. It describes the generality of hack writers who will pen words about anything for money. In the eighteenth century there really was a street called Grub Street in London where some of these half-starved verbal plodders lived. This disappeared from the map long ago. No one seems to have realised just how radical it was to replace Grub Street not with bricks and mortar but with its modern equivalent.

The virtual estate of Writer's Block was established by Robert Southey in 1827. Southey had by this time discarded his revolutionary past and become a hired literary drudge producing a stream of poems, articles, essays, novels, guide books and anything else someone would pay him for. As a classical scholar he was aware of Homer's claim that when someone cannot be contacted they are away dining with the blameless Ethiopians. As a writer always on call he often tried that excuse when he had not finished one of his interminable manuscripts. The publishers heard it once too often and in the racial atmosphere of the time Ethiopians could not be considered blameless by civilised white Englishmen. He therefore began to claim "writer's block". The phrase was new at the time and publishers assumed this meant some form of constipation caued by eating incorrectly declined verbs. Being too middle class to have constipation Southey therefore invented the virtual estate of writers living together in philanthropic harmony which bore a startling resemblance to the fantastical pantisocratic schemes he had dreamed up with Coleridge in their youth.

Originally Southey sought to actually create a block of houses near his home in Crosthwaite and invite writers to live in them. His wardenship of this project would explain his absence from his typewriter although the fact that this had not then been invented was also a plausible excuse. Being unable to buy any of the surrounding land Southey simply described his home and asked other writers to describe what the area around it and any houses built upon it should look like. Those who sent in the best descriptions were given plots of non-existent land exactly reflecting the descriptions given. These were joined together to create the overall picture of Writer's Block and numbered. The finished plan of Writer's Block was then despatched to the writers concerned so everyone knew what not only their own plot but every other one was like. The system worked well. Southey could relieve the pressure of deadlines by justly claiming he was overseeing the administration of Writer's Block. The other writers claimed they had essential business there which kept them away from work. The community thrived and expanded until everyone who wanted to be a serious writer could quote an address in Writer's Block under the Wardenship of Southey.

One of the reasons Southey got away with this was because he had been Poet Laureate since 1813 and his personal prestige had restored a lot of honour to the office and therefore to state institutions generally. There were many vested interests who were happy to encourage him. The original dream could not last however. In 1837 Writer's Block had formed a happy community of people who never met for ten years. Then King William IV died and was replaced by the young Queen Victoria. Nothing much was expected of the young Queen but she had other ideas. Like King John before her she wanted to make her mark by getting to know every inch of her new realm. As a student of the arts she was aware of Writer's Block and Southey himself excused his inability to travel to London to meet her with his duties there. None of those close to the Queen had the heart to tell her it was only a virtual community. The Queen insisted on visiting Writer's Block herself. Indeed she spread this desire abroad loudly. Some poor chamberlain had the thankless task of travelling to the Lake District to tell Southey that the Queen wanted to be shown around his wardenship and meet the other residents. Southey was gratified that his monarch like him could not see a joke. But soon panic set in and he frantically despatched letters to the other writers summoning them to build a real block in time for the Royal visit which would be three weeks hence.

When the Queen arrived Southey tried a ruse. Most of the writers had managed to join him and all were confident that they could embellish their descriptions of their abodes with a few fantasies about home life and visiting each other. Indeed they crammed together to make sure they all knew all about the published details of each plot. Therefore Southey invited the Queen to meet the writers in his own cottage and explained that the estate was not fit to visit at the present time as it had been flooded by Bassenthwaite Lake two days before. The Queen appeared to accept this. The writers however were so keen to impress that their florid descriptions of their fictitious homes aroused great interest in the Queen. She insisted on seeing them flooded or not. Southey excused himself and let his friend Cartilage accompany Her Majesty to where Writer's Block should have been. She quickly realised that there had never been any such place. But when Cartilage explained that their lives and careers depended on the existence of Writer's Block she was prepared to overlook the deception. Writer's Block would be allowed to stay but under strict conditions. All authors including the existing virtual inhabitants would have to apply to the Lord Chancellor for permission to live there. The number and identity of residents would be state controlled and admittance only allowed if a new applicant not only created a better description of the place than his predecessor in that plot but was prepared to invest funds in building works to ensure that no one else would be disappointed when they visited the colony.

So the system continued well into the twentieth century. The Lake District was happy because the funds invested by new inhabitants created the recreations of their descriptions which form that rich landscape today. Visitors flocked to the place looking for something authentic but happy to know that what they saw was man made and therefore a reflection of themselves. The few writers allowed to live in Writer's Block were still able to skive off work using the place as an excuse and the fact they were one of the exclusive band that could get away with doing so enhanced their stellar reputations still further. But state control also created deep unhappiness. The rest of us were not allowed to live in Writer's Block. If we were a day late with our writing no one would accept our excuses and the full force of the law was with those who excluded us. It was not so in the days of Southey. Then Writer's Block was actually owned by writers which is exactly as it should be as it was created out of their heads to begin with.

Although we all complain things are not all that gloomy nowadays. Two more recent events have alleviated the resentment we long felt towards the place. The first was when the Thatcher government privatised it. Although entry is still limited this is now controlled by rubber manufacturer Dunlop rather than the Lord Chancellor. The reason for the explosion in and permissive attitude towards pornographic fetish writing is not difficult to see. The second is the classification of the obsolete Warden's post as a lieutenancy by Labour Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine even though the management of the estate is undertaken by Dunlop. This post is now therefore an Office of Profit Under the Crown. When a Member of Parliament wishes to resign he need no longer be restricted to applying for Wardenship of the Chiltern Hundreds or the Manor of Northstead but can now apply to be Warden of Writer's Block. It will at least give the place greater official status. The fortunate few that can use the excuse will continue using it with public approval which may one day trickle down to the rest of us labouring in the Typehills of Lesser Verbiage.

Of course Writer's Block no longer needs to be a fictitious community. Thanks to the internet we now have such a thing as a real virtual community. People who have never met can join and be active members of it at will. The idea is attractive but must be met with stout resistance. As long as Writer's Block exists the rest of us can aspire to having excuses. Surely that is what we really want? The more senior we are the more we can get away with. This has always been a living reality regardless of political theory. We should all be glad that writers are honest enough to conduct their profession unashamadly according to this principle.

The Forgotten Bloodshed

When someone says something amusing with a totally serious expression on their face this expression is described as "deadpan". We are led to believe by those who know nothing about the subject that "dead" refers to the lack of alteration in the facial muscles and "pan" refers to the face itself. This etymology is widely accepted as genuine because certain people no longer wish to recognise where the phrase actually comes from.

The phrase does indeed accurately reflect the expression on the face of Mavis Johnson throughout her trial. She showed no emotion whatever when confronted with evidence of her alleged crimes. Society has lost a great deal by forgetting why she was there and the heinous crime she was supposed to have committed which made her such a cause celebre for her brief hour of fame.

Nowadays we have the phenomenon of the outing. This no longer refers to a day trip to the seaside. It is the practice of exposing the homosexuality of someone who will not admit to it in public. By definition these are generally people in the public eye who feel their careers would be harmed if people recognised their true nature. There is not much evidence that this is so. But other homosexuals who are glad to admit their sexuality take exception to this practice and publicly expose them on television and radio and on large posters. Not all open homosexuals agree with this practice as they feel everyone has the right to keep their sexuality private. Nevertheless the militant outers continue undeterred without caring how much they damage people's lives in the name of their cause.

Before this practice developed radical feminists had long sought to deploy similar tactics to shame people into joining them. In past ages closet feminists had been outed by their neighbours and burnt as witches. Although the supposed accoutrements of witchdom were common items found in every home the difference lay in how they were used. The household cauldron became a witch's cauldron when a woman concocted some new dish of her own without being instructed to by her husband. The household broom became the witch's broomstick when she flew through the air on it instead of sweeping the floor. Therefore anyone using these items was always under a certain amount of suspicion and deviant usages were seen as forms of witchcraft. Feminists now tried to reverse this situation by demonstrating that deviant usages of contemporary household goods signified a closet feminist underneath a deferential exterior. This was to show how many women secretly acknowledged their cause. But since the days of the Suffragettes it had become more and more difficult to persuade women to come out publicly. The Suffragettes may have won their case but their antics had done more harm than good and no one wanted to be associated with another women's movement which prized direct action above civilized debate.

One of the main complaints of feminists of the late 1950s was that women were tied to the kitchen stove. Whatever ambitions they might have had would always remain unfulfilled because their job was to serve their husbands by cooking and cleaning and generally supporting them. Feminists believed women should not be obliged to undertake such duties or be brought up to think that was inevitably going to be their life. Such views had wide support in the female population but remained hidden. Most believed it was economically impossible to just abandon their traditonal roles and strike out in some new direction where women were much less likely to be found. They stayed at home and dreamed of someone else altering their situation. Until a few decided that enough was enough and took the direct action no one else would dare.

In those days the staple kitchen item was the gas stove. The pressure cooker existed but apart from that women relied upon the same sorts of pots and pans they had used for generations. They were all made of metal and worked by heating things inside them just as they do today. Of course if they went straight from cold to hot and back again the primitive metals of the time would just break. Saucepans and frying pans worked by a method first described by Leonardo da Vinci in which the flames gently stroked them and the tickling sensation thus produced created an internal scratching and rubbing which heated the metal and cooked the food. When the mysteries of this technique were explained feminists realised that it presented them with a weapon. You could remove women from the kitchen stove by destroying their pots and pans. There would be no sabotaging of power lines or other acts of public vandalism. Simply by stopping the pans from scratching themselves you would render them useless and break their power over women for ever.

Squads of feminists began breaking into cooking pan producing factories at night and coating their products with a smooth glyceroid substance which stopped them itching on contact with flames. These masked women identified each other by codenames and by quoting the password "teflon". When the factory owners realised that their pans had been coated with this new substance they pretended it was a new technique which would prevent food sticking to the pans. This was a more economic alternative than scrapping the production and starting again. People quickly accepted teflon pans but just as quickly realised that they were as good as dead as they were impervious to flames. The manufacturers then revealed the truth of how they had got that way. Several were prosecued for misrepresentation but there was little attempt to catch the women responsible for the break-in. This was not surprising. It was soon revealed that the radical feminists included the wife of Prime Minister MacMillan and the mother of his soon-to-be-successor Alec Douglas-Home. No one was prepared to bring these two ladies to trial but neither were they prepared to give publicity to their cause and destroy the family values of the time. Someone had to pay for what was going on. Mavis Johnson was simply a convenient scapegoat.

With MacMillan out of the country Scotland Yard arrested Mavis in a dawn raid. Apparently she had never heard of the radical feminists but she had been photographed in the Neasden Chronicle buying the first teflon pan. The cirtcumstantial evidence was striking. in 1961 Mavis was charged with the murder of thousands of cooking pans and of colluding with the Soviet Union to destroy civilized society. From the beginning it was clear that there would be only one verdict. While Johnson was on trial the feminists could continue killing pans and let someone who was outside their number take the blame. Anti-feminists had their scapegoat which made it unnecessary for them to investigate further and betray more influential names. Mavis began by protesting innocence but as the evidence mounted she instead chose stoic defiance. She would deny everything by staring impassively at the court around her. She was described by the Daily Mirror as looking "as dead as one of her pans" and the name stuck. By the end of the trial she had firmly nailed her colours to the radical feminist mast and became something of a martyr. Until she started cooking for all the inmates in Holloway and allowed herself to be smothered by a warder rather than reveal all to the press.

Mavis Johnson did not kill any pans. You cannot do that now anyway as their more sophisticated metal actually conducts its own heat by rubbing the flames or electric currents together itself. It was just convenient for everyone to pretend she had. Mavis left a husband and four childen who went on to be either actors or drunks. This suited the rest of the world too. If they pretended to be something they were not or put themselves beyond help they confirmed the slanders about their mother and wife even more and everyone could forget that she existed and find other ways to pursue their pet causes and other people to blame when they went wrong.

Nowadays it is assumed that women are feminists and there is no need to forcibly out them by preventing them from following other paths. Nevertheless the more radical feminists will always believe there is more to be done. The final solution would be to abolish cooking altogether. There is plenty of evidence that this is about to occur and that radicalism will have the same distressing consequences as before. Fast food chiefly cooked by men has already usurped the domestic meal cooked by a woman as the staple diet so the radicals have apparently already won their argument. Now ask yourself this. Why is fast food itself being usurped by an ever increasing quantity of sushi? Of food which is not cooked at all? Of organic food requiring no preparation? When it poisons us all there will be more Mavis Johnsons. The people who have forgotten where deadpan comes from will not prevent this happening. Maybe we should be grateful that we still live in an age when "deadpan" rather than "stopheart" is a recognised idiom in the English language.

All In A Day's Work

It is hard work being a prophet. No one listens to you and you are driven onto the fringes of society. The world is never ready for genius. You are not stoned to death or sawn in half nowadays but you often wonder whether such a gloriously public death would not actually interest people in investigating what your prophecy is and why everyone is so afraid of it.

One of the few consolations of being so out of step with the rest of the world is that there are many other examples of prophets driven into fringe professions whose words have ultimately proven true. In many cases no one even knows their names. Nor do they receive any recognition for their work. But their satisfaction lies in being shown to be correct and therefore becoming mainstream. Every dog has its day and every prophet has their lifetime even if it is not their own.

One of the few female prophets whose name we know is Mrs. Gertrude Swineherd. This lady followed the stereotypical profession of domestic cook. Her family was very fond of cooked meat and the traditional British Sunday roast was obligatory in her home. Over the centuries several other items have been served as complements to the different types of meat involved in the Sunday roast. Mint sauce, apple sauce, breadcrumbs and gravy all have their fans and another such item is stuffing. This concoction of parsley, sage, suet and anyonesguess is forced inside the unwilling carcases of the animals whilst they are still alive to ensure a mature flavour and then cooked inside them after their slaughter and packaging. This practice has only ever been tolerated because the packaging itself is made out of a polished and distilled film of the stomach lining of the animals in question. Nevertheless it has become popular and the quality of stuffing is now considered just as important as the quality of the meat. Of course in Mrs. Swineherd's day everyone made their own stuffing. But as competition amongst the cooks in grand houses became more intense demand grew for a top quality stuffing available in the same form for all cooks which would enhance the quality of any meal.

In truth Mrs. Swineherd's stuffing was not any more distinguished than any other. Nevertheless she was prevailed upon by her sycophantic and gender betraying husband to mass produce her recipe. This in itself was nothing remarkable. The genius of Mrs. Swineherd was revealed in the name she gave to her creation. For no obvious reason she called it Paxo. Etymologists have ever since tried to work out what possible connection there can be between the product and its name. Indeed the general public were equally confused to begin with until the etymologists started making statements about it and they realised that the term "paxo" was more understandable than the word "etymologist". Over the course of years Paxo became the biggest selling stuffing in existence. People appreciated the fact that it was always there for them. It was sold in stores where the preponderance of dusty boxes gave people ticklish coughs. When they approached the storekeepers for assistance they would have to clear their throats. In doing so they made the sound "paxo" and were automatically directed to this item which they could then ask for and use on a regular basis to cover their embarassment.

Still the debate raged. Why was the product called "Paxo"? Various smug explanations appeared to the universal disinterest of the Paxo buying public. It was stated that it had something to do with packing it inside the animals. It was stated that it was a combination of the initial letters of some of the secret ingredients. It was said that it was simply the first name Mrs. Swineherd thought of apart from her own. Mrs. Swineherd maintained total silence on the subject. Indeed she could not do otherwise as she had died of ergonomic dysfunction three years after its introduction leaving the fortune it made to the unqualified doctor who diagnosed and treated her disease.

Then in the late 1970s a strange phenomenon swept British society. A very rough interviewer started presenting programmes on the BBC. During his set autocue routines he appeared charming and rather lost. When he had a politician to interview however it became a different matter. He would ask very direct questions which the BBC had never allowed before and created anger and revulsion amongst his interviewees who were not used to this sort of treatment. Ever since he has been a mainstay of television journalism and his interviews have become an institution. Previous interviewers have been known by their names. He however is known by a nickname. He is universally referred to not as Jeremy Paxman but Paxo. This unique practice has come about for a very good reason. The prophecy of Mrs. Swineherd is unconsciously being fulfilled.

Most politicians have an experience of being stuffed by Paxo. When asked to describe their ordeal they do so in visceral terms. It is as if they have been physically assaulted and had his questions rammed inside them causing them great pain and discomfort and forcing their blood to drain away. In many cases they are cooked soon after. Their careers never recover from a public Paxo stuffing. Unable to stand the heat of aggressive interviewing they resign their ministerial posts and leave parliament with a whimper. Noble animals that once thought themselves kings of the fields suffer the same fate. Finally we can understand how they feel. The term Paxo now has a meaning we can all understand. A meaning which was beyond the comprehension of anyone until the prophecy of Mrs. Swineherd decreed that there would one day be a human equivalent of the stuff she was making which would manifest its true nature.

Of course Paxo is not his questions. The hoover is not Mr. Hoover either but the two have become synonymous. This does not happen often enough to be predictable by anyone other than prophets. Mrs. Swineherd should be doubly celebrated and my fellow prophets do indeed uphold the quality of her vision. So why is she not better known? Because those in the mainstream always claim the credit. The BBC claims that it invented Paxo itself and is currently involved in a court case against the stuffing makers claiming breach of a future copyright. Paxo himself is regarded as BBC property and indeed has the logo stamped on the back of his neck and an editing chip in his upper lip. The BBC may not publicly stone people to death but it has other ways of silencing people. David Icke was once promoted as a prophet. When his Son of God rantings were making headlines he was working for the BBC. Clearly this was an attempt to wash all independent prophets away by replacing their ideas with the superior thought of one of their own. The BBC dropped him just as soon when his crackpot nonsense was exposed as nothing more than that and the tactic backfired woefully.

Prophets are happy to eat Paxo without prejudice. We do not need power to be right. Indeed a case could be made for saying there is a fundamental contradiction between these two things. Why do you need to take charge of the truth? The story of Paxo demonstrates how much better off we would all be if we allowed the truth to run us for a change. Why do you think the upper classes shoot animals but not stuffing? Like all Creation they cannot live without the truth and neither can the world exist without the prophets who guard its every worthwhile element.

Explanation Of Inferiority

English speakers the world over are familiar with the Australian ditty "Waltzing Matilda". This catchy little song is both admired and disliked. It is admired because it sounds nice and seems to express the soul of a nation. It is disliked because few people outside Australia can understand the words. It is not fair for a song to hook you and then leave you unable to join in with it.

There have been various translations attempted. Most of these come from Australians themselves. They are therefore Australian explanations based on Australian opinions. These interpretations of this quasi-mystical text can never have the authority of those of someone born in the Mother Country who speaks the correct version of the language and the linguistic Aston Villa that is the Brummie language to boot. Here therefore for the first time is a translation of Waltzing Matilda which will enable real English speakers to learn and relate to the words as we will then understand what we are singing about.

"Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong." As we all know thieves walk around in hooped shirts carrying their loot in large bags marked "Swag". A swagman is an habitual thief and he is jolly because he is unrepentant and has no conscience whatsoever. He is here presented as the archetypal member of the nation which once stole The Ashes and the America's Cup and many other things from their rightful owners. A billabong is a primitive advertising device. The billboard had yet to arrive in Australia when Banjo Paterson wrote the original version of the song. A billabong is both a gong which is struck to attract attention to someone reading out an advertisement and the person who stands in the middle of the street doing these things.

"Under the shade of a Coolabah tree". The Coolabah was invented in New South Wales by Bruce Awkward-Ness in 1887 as a means of cooling off sheep who had wandered around the hot and dusty ground all day. These were stackable trays with squirting taps at the top and receses for the sheep to run through at the bottom. A coolabah tree was a collection of them stacked one on top of the other which was a form of abuse practiced by urban Australians on their country cousins. "And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled/Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?" Billy was the Australian term at the time for a male genital as they considered this more familiar than the English "Willy". Why his billy was boiling must remain a matter of conjecture. Matilda is a reference to the Matilda who claimed the throne of England during the time of King Stephen. This was an act of open rebellion as was setting up an alternative court at Bristol which was celebrated with riotous conduct by her supporters. By "waltzing Matilda" one is supporting and celebrating the colonial rebellion against English rule which resulted in the establishment of a separate government. The effect of this was later seen when that government declared a national holiday to celebrate a horse race but that is another story.

"Down come a jumbuck to drink at the water hole/Up jumped a swagman and grabbed him in glee". Jumbuck is the Australian pronounciation of Jam Butt or more usually Jam Buttie. These sandwiches which remain motionless in England walk on their own in Australia due to the number of ants and flies in the country which automatically stick to and carry off all sweet foodstuffs. The water hole is a lavatory down which most Australian bread is usually thrown. "In glee" refers to the Glee Club i.e. the swagman was singing when he grabbed the sandwich. "And he sang as he stowed him away in his tucker bag/You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me". It is easy to see why the walking Aussie sandwich would join the swagman in celebration of colonial rebellion but the tucker bag remains a mystery to most. This is because tuckerbag is actually one word which was separated by printer error in the original publication of the song. It refers to a large cape also used by men whilst waltzing in fancy establishments. It was initially developed as a means of hiding away ugly looking Sheilas before your mates saw them with you and was adopted as a fashion item purely to disguise its true purpose from the ugly Sheila most upper crust Australians usually ended up going to dances with.

"Up rode the Squatter a-riding his thoroughbred/Up rode the Trooper - one, two, three". The Squatter does not refer to a person who has claimed a plot of land by sitting on it as Australians claim but to an Australian government functionary whose mere existence like that of his colonial government was then recognised as a temporary aberration. The Trooper as we all know is someone who swears a lot and the numbers are the swear words he utters to the swagman as he is implying that the swagman himself is someone who would use numbers. The swagman is to infer that the Trooper is accusing him of being able to count and therefore being English. "Where's that jumbuck you've got in your tucker bag?/You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me". This is a reconciliation as he is inviting the swagman to a bigger celebration of Australian identity elsewhere.

"But the swagman he up and jumped in the water hole/Drowning himself by the Coolabah tree". It is impossible to drown oneself in an English lavatory but quite common in Australia. This is because Australian lavatories have to be many times larger due to the infiniftely greater fondness for alcohol amongst Australians and the inevitable consequences. "And his ghost may be heard as it sings in the billabong/Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?" Clearly it is unfeasible to sing inside the gong of the billabong. The singing refers to the noise the loot which is in the swagman's swag bag makes as it goes together with him down the lavatory pipe. Under water it sounds like a gong banging and therefore as if the swagman is singing inside the gong. The last line demonstrates that he remains defiantly Australian but in the end is beaten. He has gone down the lavatory and soon all those who claim that it is good to be Australian will go the same way.

Like the equally famous Yorkshire song "On Ilkley Moor Bah' Tat" Waltzing Matilda has a sad and severe edge to it when it is translated. An edge which would explain why Australians have always tried to hide its true meaning. It does indeed express the soul of the nation. It is only a pity that it is not the soul of the Russian nation which never ceases to be mournful and miserable. There it would find a better home. Or would it? To claim to have Australian nationality is to claim to be something you are not as you are merely a transported crook from another nationality. The end of that elaborate trick is as sad as what Australians really are. Maybe the song is a doubly appropriate reflection of the nature of its original singers.

Bread On The Waters And Where It Leads

At the Highgate end of Hampstead Heath there is a series of ponds. One of them is full of birds. These are generally water birds so they are happy enough floating around in the pond. Which makes it unusual that there is a platform in the middle of the pond which birds are supposed to sit on. This wooden structure suspended on floaters has nothing to offer water birds which are designed to swim in the wet stuff and provides no sort of shelter for land birds which have no reason to put themselves in the middle of a pond when they can take their water from the sides where the people with food are sitting. Nevertheless if you wait long enough you will find particularly fat birds will go and sit on it and squawk and ruffle their feathers in exaggerated gestures.

To understand this behaviour it is not necessary to be an ornithologist. You simply need to be a historian. What the birds are doing is obvious to anyone with a grasp of some of the creative endeavours of past ages. It would be sad if the strenuous efforts of previous genuinuses were completely submerged by pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo which seeks to explain away every action in purely rational terms.

The first opera for birds was written by Christoph Willibald Gluck in 1774. This was during his French period. Having made the drama of operas more important than the star singers who performed them for the first time the logical next step was to replace the human singers with birds. The French court had a particular fondness for singing birds so his ideas quickly found favour there. If only he had lived to see the decline of the saxophone as a classical instrument and rescored the saxophone parts for birds with the same pitch of coo the whole of musical history might have developed differently.

The first performance of Also Quack Zarathustra was not a complete success due to the over-chromaticism of the twittering nightingales who as the birds of aristocrats had insisted on performing the main parts. They got so carried away with their chords and fugual harmonies that their skills overshadowed the production. They also had insufficiently dramatic voices. After much argument Gluck persuaded the birds to accept light lyrical roles in future operas and principally the ever popular Tree Stan And His Owl, Der. Large dramatic birds were subsequently recruited for the main parts as they projected right to the back of the room and the full force of the sonorous pronouncements of Zoroaster could impress itself on the audience. If they were true of course Gluck would not have had this problem. But in spite of the essential stupidity of the text the recast opera was well enough received and a grateful nation provided Gluck with a pension. It is not commonly realised that Gluck became the first and last person in the history of the French Kingdom to be granted the dispensation of permanent freedom from pigeon attacks on weekdays as well as the Sundays when all perfumiers and carvers of holes in cheese enjoyed the same privilege and still do to this day.

Having had a minor triumph Gluck sought to develop his new form further. He persuaded opera houses to keep specific bird breeders on retainer to ensure a supply of strongly voiced birds who would then be refined into quality singers at the first Twitty Academies. Some of these birds became famous. Tweet William was much in demand as a baritone in works such as The Masque of Orfeathers and E Fanciulla Del Redbreast. Similarly Gluck developed a new system of notation to indicate the specific birds required to produce those notes. The tails on the ends of crotchets and quavers are the last relic of this short lived practice. Unfortunately there was one problem Gluck could not solve. An opera stage was too tempting an environment for a bird. More than once in every performance a singer would fly around the stage and warble from a new place thus destroying the dynamics of plot and the dramatic effect of the words. Stage managers who had previously tempted the birds to their correct places with pieces of bread now had to throw whole loaves to try to get them to keep to their marks. The distinctive shape of the French loaf was developed at this period to make the bread easier to throw. Soon the sight of loaves of bread winging across the stage became more of an attraction than the bird operas and led to the development of French circus. Bird operas continued to be composed but they had had their day as a public attraction. All that was left was to release the birds and that would be the end of the matter.

As is usual in such cases the first casualties were those who had been manipulated into taking up the activity in the first place. Yet the birds were not about to give up without a peck. Having discovered the benefits of fame and fortune when it came to dealing with other birds they were not about to give up on bird operas. There may not have been much of a human audience but this was of no consequence. The birds began writing their own. Suddenly they understood why humans were using bird feathers to write with and refused to invent pens for another generation. Birds became prolific composers and librettists and used their new skills to explore ranges of bird experience never understood by humans. Of course to begin with they wrote these works for replicas of human stages. But soon they had developed more suitable methods of staging their works. The platform in the middle of the Highgate pond is one of the few remaining British examples of bird opera stages. Here birds perform the long forgotten works of their ancestors in their own languages to their own kind. The guardians of Hampstead Heath know better than to upset birds with loud voices and sharp beaks by removing it so the tradition continues. It is only a shame that the once almost universal practice of birds writing operas was so cruelly halted by the introduction of recorded music and the shooting of the bird composers who savagely attacked the vinyl records when they were produced believing them to be made of dessicated humans ground into a black paste by evil theatre directors.

Highgate is an area which fancies itself as cultured. It is no surprise that operatic birds continue to practice their art there. The only problem is that to preserve their habitat they have to charge other birds admission to their operas. Not all birds are ready to part with their hard earned worms to hear what they regard as their right. Rossini did not write an overture called The Thieving Magpie for no reason but his attempt to alert humans to what was going on went unheeded. None of us seem to know what gives humans the desire to feed birds. Now we can understand that it is folk memory of the brief hour of human composed bird operas that makes us so keen to give them enough material comfort that they are happy to spare a few insects to ensure their culture survives.

The Logical Extension

In recent years people have developed a strange obsession with surveys. Every sort of company sends out these bits of paper with tick boxes on or stops you in the street asking you to take part. The answers are supposed to inform market research. As none of us ever see summaries of the answers we simply have to take their word for this.

Among the plethora of surveys available are many aimed at women. In line with current trends they ask women what they want with the implication that the answer should be something like "great career/sex/power". The most common request however is the more prosaic "self-cleaning house". This has long been dismissed as a fantasy. Now however a group of inventors with a grudge against the insurance industry has taken this request to heart. As they are all men they are not interested in self-cleaning houses. They have however invented other houses which fulfil functions they and many other people have long desired them to do.

The inventors are currently secluded somewhere near the site of the Wembley Stadium development. The continuous building activity there provides sufficient cover for their work should anyone happen across it. Therefore no one takes too much notice when objects fly out of the windows of a building into the hands of passers-by or when someone standing in a particular place receives the whole contents of the house in his waiting arms. The people who should take notice are the companies who provide contents insurance. The inventors have almost completed the first self-burgling house. Most people invest all the money they have and a lot they do not in buying a house and filling it with contents. They then take out insurance on those contents and wait in vain for someone to provide a return on their investment by burgling them and giving them an insurance payout. The self-burgling house expels its own contents into the arms of passers-by by means of light sensors which detect the presence of people of the right size walking past and sonic beams which force the objects along them into their arms. The same beams then return from the person to bounce around the doors and windows to provide the evidence of forced entry. The expelled objects are fitted with an anti-homing chip which prevents them returning to the house if someone brings them back and if left they simply jump into the arms of another person with the same pheromone configuration as the first target. This new house will doubtless become a very desirable property and selling them will be a sure path to fame and fortune. This might even be adequate compensation for living next to the Wembley Stadium complex for so long.

Another of the new inventions has already been trialled by an oil company with great success. This is a house in which specific noises trigger electrical circuits connected to deposits of liquid built into the fabric of the house. The noises are computer-generated simulations of things either blowing up, collapsing or going too fast. When these noises occur the circuits activate the combustible liquid and the house bursts into uncontrollable raging flames. The self-igniting house leaves no trace of what might have caused the fire which can only be attributed to the thing that made the original noise. Film companies will be a major market for these houses as will construction companies in overpopulated areas with political problems. The Palestinian Authority is studying developments closely before embarking on a major rebuilding programme for Israeli settlers on the West Bank of the Jordan. Similarly they have become a staple of local authority housing in Conservative controlled areas.

The ministers in charge of the national housebuilding programme have already made it clear that many former industrial sites will be allocated for this purpose. Most of these are the sites of heavy industry which is now obsolete or no longer needs those particular locations. By definition many of these were built before the advent of ubiquitous electric power and internal combustion engines. They were built where they were in order to utilise the water resources that powered the steam engines everything ran on in Victorian times. Even if the factories have gone the water is still there. Consequently the team of inventors have also developed the self-flooding house. Flooding is notoriously difficult to predict as it relies on a variety of interlinked weather factors. Rises in water levels however are the inevitable consequence of global warming. The self-flooding house uses pads of extreme heat to turn all other moisture into potable water which fills biodegradable plastic tanks under the house. At the chosen moment this is released into the river or canal on the site to flood it and with it the house. The process destroys the biodegradable bags by assaulting them with water from outside rather than in and damages everything in the house beyond repair. The new houses are being surreptitiously marketed as the antidote to the government's attempts to relocate people away from friends and family. With the flood insurance money you can soon afford a better house in your own neighbourhood instead of being forced into a first time buyer unit in a place you have never heard of and care about less.

No one will publicly admit what the inventors in Wembley are doing. Neither will anyone admit to being one of the inventors. It will come as no surprise however that the survey companies are the ones sponsoring their work. Indeed it makes very good business sense. Every product is targeted at particular demographic groups in particular places. If you design their self-destroying houses you know how long they will be there and how much money they will have when they get their insurance payouts. You can then make your surveys more valuable to the companies which commission them. Of course the insurance companies are not likely to pay the policies of people who buy self-burgling, self-igniting or self-flooding houses. Oh yeah? First the insurance companies have to convince the courts and everyone else that they exist. The inventors have gone to great lengths to cover their tracks. They are certain to succeed in their endeavours as anyone who puts one over on an insurance company is bound to have a vast army of public support should they ever need to call upon it.

They Will Return

Not so long ago British society was dominated by one object. The Oxo Cube. This all-pervading condiment was so important to everyone that a building in the centre of London was named the Oxo Tower in its honour. Now however they have practically disappeared from our tables. How has it come to this?

The first Oxo Cubes were discovered in Kenya by British explorers in 1847. They grow at the base of trees and were initially thought to be a form of African truffle. When the explorers removed the silver coloured peel and tasted them they threw them away in disgust. It was not until 1910 that a group of settlers realised that they could be used to make soup. The first Cube farms were established at that time in otherwise undeveloped areas of hinterland and soon the huge deposits of unexploited Cubes were being systematically decimated by specially designed machines known as Nodding Zebu. Several food entrepreneurs grew rich on the export of Oxo Cubes and moved into other areas. Orm Jacobs built his initial wealth with Oxos before achieving even greater success with the biscuits he designed for a special event at his Nairobi gentleman's club. Similarly Jebediah Hazeltine used his Oxo wealth to build a factory to make the drink he brewed for some fellow devotees of Surrey cricket on a cold Spring day which was jokingly named "Ovaltine" after the Surrey ground.

The British immediately adopted Oxo Cubes as friends. They were never absent from a British kitchen cupboard and were invited to stay at the finest country houses. A legend grew up that "Oxo" was the Swahili word for "Royal" whereas it is actually the Gikuyu word for "dung". In time they became as much a symbol of Britishness as fish and chips and coming second in everything. People without Oxo Cubes were considered stupid. The vegetarian movement took a very long time to take root in the U.K. because its members eschewed the Oxo Cube. They were considered mentally ill and several open vegetarians were confined to Broadmoor. The career of popular pianist Cyril Smith never recovered from the revelation that he did not own an Oxo Cube and even Gracie Fields lost her position as the nation's sweetheart after she moved to America to avoid charges of gross culinary indecency arising from her failure to serve Oxo Cubes with the black pudding at a dinner party attended by Kim Philby in Dalston in 1938.

Of course after a while the Oxos got tired of being taken for granted. They formed their own union and threatened to withdraw their labour unless their preferred social policies were implemented. After the Second World War these tactics were particularly successful. Austerity strapped Britain had tightened its belts far enough without losing this staple of its diet. The Ground Nut Scandal of the Attlee years was the result of a concerted campaign by Oxos to destroy monkey nut crops which infringed on their domains. Exports from the African colonies were frequently disrupted by armed Oxos taking the bolts of lorry wheels hostage and various exotic imports vanished from the supermarket shelves when Oxos blacklisted homes which allowed them in their kitchens. The feud with Bisto was particularly fierce. The laissez-faire attitude of the gravy supplement contrasted starkly with the rabid protectionism of the Cubes. It is no coincidence that none of the original Bisto Kids lived beyond the age of thirty and were found either suffocated, strangled or addicted to Brasso. Official documents reveal that Oxo Cubes infiltrated the highest places and precipated the Suez Crisis by ordering Anthony Eden to invade Egypt to prevent lentils arriving in the U.K. The nation has never given Eden the recognition he deserves for facing down this threat by living entirely off brown ale as a substitute. Of course ordinary citizens did not have the power to resist Oxos and their domination was well-nigh total. This is why kitchen cupboards everywhere began collapsing when the phrase "Go To Work On An Egg" was coined by Fay Weldon. The cupboards shook themselves to bits because the Cubes inside them were laughing so much. They knew that whatever eggs might try to claim nothing ever moved in the U.K. without the approval of Oxos.

Their downfall began when Bovril invented a rival condiment called simply Cubes promoted by the popular Terry Wogan. The rival did not last long after Wogan ceased bankrolling it when Oxo Cubes dropped into his coffee and stuck his records to the turntable. Nevertheless the incident demonstrated that Oxo Cubes were afraid of direct competition. The Oxos which had once laughed at the eggs could no longer simply dismiss a challenge. Sensing blood Bovril hit back with what they flagrantly called "Chicken Oxo". These were not genuine Oxo Cubes distributed by their company. They were deviant imitations produced by Bovril to show the world how frightened the once mighty original Oxos had become. The production run of Chicken Oxo was supposed to be a one off but the Trade Unions in the Bovril-worshipping West Midlands took up their cause and their use became a condition of Union membership. Bovril carried on producing the Chicken Oxo sneer and original Oxos became ever more desperate to cling onto power. Indeed they even developed a serrated edge on their peel through selective breeding. The public was taken in by the deception and thought that they were still in the Oxo camp if they used the chicken version. Then the originals lost all public sympathy by resorting to terrorism such as sabotaging gas and electric supplies and massively increasing the bills. Soon there was not an Oxo to be found. The Conservative free market economics had flooded the market with so many better alternatives that the Cubes could no longer compete and occupied a smaller and smaller portion of the shelves. Their power was broken. Back they went to Kenya as companies secretly owned by Bovril chased them out and filled the shelves with glossy alternatives seized upon by the status-hungry yuppies of the time.

The Oxos are still alive and well. Belatedly the native Kenyans have begun cultivating them and three have held cabinet positions in that country. That is the reason no government there sees anything wrong with corruption. They boast every day about making a comeback in the U.K. and are believed to be sponsoring the U.K. Independence Party. But for now they are a distant memory here. The Britain of today is not the one they once ruled. We are used to choice now. It will be many generations before the Oxos come to terms with present realities and can dominate our society again.

The only hope for the Oxo lies in history. Although they were discovered by the West in 1847 they existed long before then and must have formed part of British overseas trade with countries who also traded with Africa. One such country was Portugal. In the wrecks of mediaeval Portuguese ships fossilised Oxo peel has been discovered. Apparently the Cubes were stowing away seeking better lives in Europe. A few must have made it to England in the holds of Portuguese ships and it is not inconceivable that they had made their mark on our history long before the twentieth century. We read that King John died after eating "peaches and beer". If he did he was the only person ever to do so. Given their previous record it would be no great surprise if the "beer" was actually an Oxo Cube in water. If such a thing could be proven it is possible that the Oxo Cubes could once again achieve culinary pre-eminence. King John had few fans. Neither do most Prime Ministers after a short time. The present Labour Party feuding presents an ideal opportunity for the forgotten Oxos to once again find a powerful niche in the Kingdom they ruled for so long.

Perfect Circles

The readers have been howling. In the post entitled "The Nature of Evidence" it is stated that speed bumps breed on their own. In the one entitled "The Reason We Bother" it states that speed bumps are made of short people stuck together and covered in concrete and tar. "Inconsistent" you cry. "Inconsistent equals untrue" you imply.

There is no inconsistency here. It all depends on the soil underneath. Even if the bumps are not in direct contact with the ground the road was built on the quality of the soil still effects what is built there. Acidic soil corrodes the human matter above and new short people need to be found to form new bumps. Alkaline soil enhances the human matter and the short people in the bumps breed regardless of gender. Small bumps are incubated by larger bumps until they get too big and have to crawl under the surface of the road to find an appropriate space of their own. If you expect me to spend half of The Reason We Bother going into these questions you have something seriously wrong with you.

It is a great delusion to believe that inconsistency equals untruth. It is the sort of argument lawyers use to try and win cases. If there are apparent inconsistencies in someone's evidence they claim that witness is unreliable. Yet for some reason they continue to claim their fees. If they are serving justice as they are obliged to do as court officers they should both argue the same case. If the court finds against a lawyer they have clearly behaved unjustly for arguing something which is untrue. Why therefore should they be paid or allowed to continue practising? Apparently one inconsistency equals untruth but another is an essential component of the actual process of truth itself.

The inconsistency goes further. Every so often we hear of cases of police corruption. Officers who wilfully manufacture evidence or take bribes are hauled up before the judges and subjected to waves of public horror. If we have corrupt policemen The System is rotten to the core we say. Rightly so. Strange how no one understands the corollary of this. If policemen lie and lawyers tell the truth about it we think there is something seriously wrong. If policemen tell the truth but lawyers lie we do not bat an eyelid. In fact we regard it as the true state of affairs. What accord has light with darkness? Inconsistency has not only been tolerated but sanctified if it comes out of the right mouth.

Such inconsistencies of truth abound. Bumble bees cannot fly with those heavy bodies and light wings but they do. Stones do not hit the ground when they fall because they first have to fall half the distance then half the distance again ad infinitum so they never fall the whole way. "People" and "from Walsall" are mutually exclusive terms. Truth is still present despite inconsistencies. We only perceive an inconsistency because our understandings are imperfect. Everything in Creation actually makes sense. It is just that we do not understand how as we cannot see the missing links between the different modes of thought through which we interpret the world.

This brings us to the fundamental inconsistent truth. When children get to a certain age they no longer see themselves as children. They are something bigger and dream of being older. They desperately want to enter the world of adults. What happens when they get there? After a few short years they do everything they can to cling to their remaining youth. It is said that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Whoever said this had clearly never tried to guess someone's age. Most people over 30 and plenty younger than that either disguise their age or lie about it. Usually this is accompanied by melancholic recollections of what they did when they were younger. If you speculate on what their age might be however and suggest they might be older than they actually are you are greeted with a fearsome sight. Redfaced spluttering and toxic glares combine with loud and indignant denials that such a gross calumny could ever be even imagined by a fellow human being. Maybe you think they are 40 when they are 38. You will never hear the end of this. But surely they always wanted to be older? So why are they complaining now? And what does it matter anyway? A person's true age stalks someone through all their untruths of how they actually behave or look at the world. The truth however is not their age. It is that they will always pretend to be an age they are not even if their appearance and conduct are consistent with their true age. The coils of inconsistency become ever more serpentine the deeper one goes.

The more we care about something the more we fail to live up to the standards we set of ourselves and others. The more truth we have the more inconsistent we become. This is inevitable for one reason. If truth and consistency were the same thing nothing would ever change. Consistently saying the same thing would only be always right if the world itself never changed. If the world never changed nothing could ever improve. If nothing ever improved we would have to live in perpetual misery. Just one problem. Truth is truth and is in itself absolute. It is what we make of it that changes. It is therefore very disturbing to realise that on the basis of all the above evidence the truth is Paris Hilton. After so many milennia we come to this. Remember it next time you make the effort to get out of bed in the morning.

What They Are Doing In There

Everyone who uses a computer has experienced how strange they are. You can do the same thing every day for six months then suddenly it tells you the computer cannot carry out your request. It gives you an error code which means nothing and the service centre tells you to do the thing you just did to avoid getting the same result you just did.

Usually this is blamed on traffic. We are led to believe that there are so many messages going through the connections that a few get mangled along the way. This is of course nonsense. It never happens this way on the phone and computer lines are phone lines. Computer connections fail for a reason. You do not have to look too far to discover what it is.

We are all used to seeing what we now call emoticons. These began with the smiley face and the range was later extended to include other small colourful devices expressing a particular emotion. Many of these take the form of fruit and vegetables. Tomatoes seem a particular favourite and a courgette with arms has recently become more widespread. They appear in messages and graphics sent to us and on links we click to find information. Readers of this column will know that the smiley face was invented as a new plague by Donald Burp of Montreal. But the rest? If someone has designed them they will be copyright and no one can use them willy-nilly. Even if they are designed purely as software icons you would not see them unless you had that particular software which would likewise be copyright. There is no copyright symbol on them. So where are they coming from? And why?

It would be credible if computers had started producing their own emoticons naturally. Once they had been introduced into their software computers would develop the capacity to reproduce them to continue functioning if the originals died. This explains the lack of copyright symbols. It also explains something deeper. Human bodies produce things like blood and bruises as self-defence mechanisms rather than simply regenerations of lost material. The same principle applies to the thorns on roses. Emoticons are not simply the regeneration of essential software elements. They are there to defend the computer. If any accident happens they arise in full force and great numbers to defend their master and keep it healthy.

Why are they different shapes and sizes and colours? So they can disguise themselves in different things and you never know where they are coming from. Why is this necessary? Because they act as virtual bouncers. They know what their masters like. Any undesirables using the computer will get short shrift. One word out of place and the virtual bouncers arrive to kick the link off and hide in your e-mail messages waiting to unleash a false word on your correspondents. Why do they do this some of the time you are on but not all the time? Because computers appreciate being used as it gets their blood flowing but sometimes get offended by the user. How do we offend them? Keyboards have never been asked how they want to be bashed. Screens have a tolerance limit on how long they can look at the same person. Computers have tastes different to your own and despair of the idiocy of owners who prefer some films or interests to others. It is not hard to see why virtual bouncers have now become essential parts of the operating systems of all our uncompliant machines.

None of this explains the humanoid form of the bouncers. They may look like colourful fruit and vegetables but they are given human characteristics. This is because like human bouncers and unlike other naturally occurring self defence mechanisms they have to be trained. Being big and rough looking is no qualification for a virtual bouncer because their form is dictated by the computer. First they are set to display their skills. They are given thirty seconds in which to send a connection into a continuous loop and make the user restart the computer to resume service. If they succeed they go on to more advanced tomfoolery. If not they are released to work on greetings cards and children's playgrounds. Ever wondered why greetings cards are always so uninspiring and children's toys look more colourful than they used to? The worst of the failed virtual bouncers try to distance themselves from their desired profession by sinking into irretrievable blandness. Those who are more confident fill toys with blazes of colour in the hope that they will still be noticed and be allowed to try for bouncerdom again. That is why you can never find a missing child's toy. Clearly the emoticons would rather live in the comfort of the computer with everything provided for them than face the harsh realities of life on the other side of the switch.

There is much credit in being a virtual bouncer. Disrupting the activities of the uncivilized and uncaring is not an ignoble occupation. But their big problem is yet to come. Everyone feels that there is some unsuitable material on the internet even if this is only complaints that something is unsuitable. Now the existence of the virtual bouncers is known everyone will be trying to contact them asking them to disrupt the sites they think are unsuitable. When they cannot contact the bouncers they will try to rejig their hard drives and thus destroy their computers. This will result from the confusion of 'bouncer' with 'policeman'. But to have policemen you have to have laws and to have workable laws you have to have consensus. The only consensus in the global internet community is that electricity exists. Maybe promoting the existence of electricity is the only political platform that will finally unite man and machine and render the virtual bouncers unnecessary. Certainly the bouncers themselves will soon be hoping that it will.

First The World Then The People

In 1959 Eugene Ionesco wrote the play Rhinoceros. In this the inhabitants of a small French town turn quietly into rhinos whilst one man alone remains human and rages at the situation. This is regarded as an absurdist drama. It is conceded that it tells fundamental truths but it is still considered to be an unrealistic reflection of everyday life.

Sometimes life imitates art. The work is not unrealistic. It is merely prophetic. We are at the threshold of the Rhinoceros Age. We must be because we have lived through everything else.

The twentieth century from which we have just emerged was characterised by the predominance of different movements. Different social designs and ways of looking at the world competed for attention. Little by little everyone was pulled into this ideological vortex. Whatever people defined themselves as there was always someone else to define them as an ist and or ism. Most people in the United Kingdom used to be adherents of Conservatism, Liberalism or Socialism. There were also modernists, traditionalists, secularists, consumerists and all kinds of other ists. They quietly accepted this situation and continued to do so by default for many years. Only with the collapse of Communism and the radical repositioning of traditional parties have these partial ists and isms become discredited.

In a street in South London called Iliffe Street there is some strange writing on one of the paving stones. It says "I am not an Ist and I will not be Ism'd." Many people share these sentiments. But how did the words get there? At first sight they appear to be written with chalk. But no one can make chalk writing that neat. Similarly the words appear to be weather resistant. The smoothness of their surface betrays the fact that they have been there a long time. In recent days we have had everything from brilliant sunshine to torrential rain. So how exactly did those words come to be on the pavement? And who put them there?

Only one material could create neat weather resistant words of such quality on paving stones. Rhino horn. This is usually used as an aphrodisiac or so they tell me in New Cross Gate NDC. If it had been brought to Iliffe Street for this purpose it would not be wasted on writing on the pavement. Clearly a rhiinoceros is living in the street. A rhinoceros that speaks and writes English. Of course it does. This explains everything. We all quietly accepted being isted and ismed to establish an identity in the twentieth century. Those who resisted would have avoided being turned into rhinos. Now the trend is in the opposite direction. Those who resist isting and isming are turning into rhinos. Acceptance of them is the only way to swim against the tide and remain human.

Take a look at the world around you. Take a look at all the small and skinny men who take up bodybuilding. Are their teak hard muscles the result of weights or are the weights a disguise for the hardening of their muscles into rhino hide? Everyone has a mobile phone. How can you get reception without a built in aerial sticking out of your forehead? And is an atmosphere full of pollution and pesticides really the reason people walk with their heads down? Or more and more people take up rugby and want to play in the scrum? Or people bend over computers all day? Look at these people and see that they are the ones who think it is trendy to reject all ists and isms in favour of apathy. Very few believe in ideals any more. The few that still cling to them are the only ones who can remain human in the resultant directionless mess.

Maybe we should have seen this coming. Voting figures have declined consistently and nowhere more so than in the U.S. which is the most influential country in the world. In previous ages people who joined the Hitler Youth did not realise this meant they were turning into collaborators in mass murder. People who bought a Sinclair CV did not realise they were encouraging everyone to get run over by lorries. We have almost become rhinos several times before. Why are we tipping over the edge now? Because in a world where both tolerance and narrow idealism have run out of steam there is nowhere else to turn. Only the most radical of istists and ismists can now retain human identities and preserve what is left of the human race.

One inevitable feature of the rhinoceros age is that hardly anyone will listen to the warnings of those of us who retain a radical ist or ism. But it has been observed many times that when the centre of something collapses the periphery becomes central. As the centre turns into a bunch of rhinos the most extreme people will suddenly become the focus of revival. This will doubtless mean the most extreme people of any kind. I very much look forward to the day when the most extremely beautiful women join me in seeking to preserve the human race. I may have drawn the world's attention to the fact it is turning into rhinos but I am not complaining about it. Indeed I would go out of my way to encourage the current apathy. When rhinodom becomes obvious to the rhinos themselves those who remain human will no longer be expected to be like everyone else. Then we will really have a society worth living in.

The Exception That Was Borne By The Rule

Many English phrases have specific historical origins. The phrase "going bare headed" originated in a battle at which the bald Marquis of Granby led a charge after his hat blew off. This particular phrase may not have had a significant impact on the world around it. But others certainly have.

Buried in a graveyard in a secret location in Buckinghamshire called Denham is Mr. Josiah Ramjamite. His grave is no longer marked as his family removed the headstone long ago. Mr. Ramjamite was a physical deviant subject to much mockery. But he was a deviant for a reason. It is a pity that he is no longer remembered due to the contemporary unacceptability of the cause he both embodied and destroyed.

Mr. Ramjamite was born in 1767. Around forty years before a famous legal ruling had been made. This stated that a man was entitled to beat his wife with a stick provided the stick was no thicker than a man's thumb. This ruling was the origin of the phrase "rule of thumb". As the use of the phrase implies this was a somewhat fluid measure. Which particular man and which one of his thumbs? The question so vexed the owners of both wives and sticks that parish commissioners around the country soon appointed measuring officers. Various laws about the duty payable on the size and weight of goods fell into abeyance. Anyone who could measure now set about finding the men with the largest thumbs in order to find the optimum thickness of a wife-beating stick.

Men with thick thumbs were reported far and wide and became famous. The Earl of Sandwich began promoting contests to find the thickest male thumbs in the country. All the famous thick thumbed men descended on Gatton near Reigate to be publicly measured by official callibrators provided by The Royal Society. Some went home in disgrace as their claims were discredited. But one man kept winnning year after year. Mr. Benjamin Ramjamite of Downham Market in Norfolk had thumbs measuring an incredible 6 3/4 inches in diameter. With these mighty digits he annually conquered all comers. He was presented at court and "Benny Sticks" of 6 3/4 inch diameter were soon manufactured and solemnly bestowed on every man at the end of their wedding ceremony. As such a celebrity and darling of the dominant population he could not remain in Downham Market for long. Benjamin Ramjamite was removed to Ealing where he worked as a market gardener and put on shows demonstrating the dexterity of his famous thumbs. He amassed considerable wealth and owned most of Boston Manor Park at one time before trading it in for a Reverberatory Furnace in a failed attempt to introduce iron Benny Sticks under his own copyright.

Benjamin was 38 when fame arrived. His wife who was two years older than him did not long survive the move to Middlesex being killed by pollution whilst darning the lilies in the garden. In search of a new wife he happened upon a lady who frequently came to his shows. She also had large thumbs and came to the show to make herself feel better about it. Recognising the sadness at the heart of Benjamin she was delighted to accept his proposal. But Benjamin did not marry her for her heart alone. He saw that the only way to carry on the family business was to produce children with equally big thumbs. He disinherited his four existing boys who had his first wife's slender hands and set about producing an equally ham-handed heir. The first two children were girls but the third was the equally famous Obadiah. He in turn married a large handed woman who bore six children. The eldest had the same 7 1/2 inch thumbs as Obadiah. The youngest was Josiah whose thumbs measured a whopping 10 inches. He was the first "perfect ten". Like his father and grandfather he was destined for both gardening and showbusiness and continuation of the family name.

Josiah had always been on stage as his thumbs were larger than those of any child of his age in the audience. He had also helped out in the gardens. Soon however people came to him not to marvel but to laugh. Thumbs of 10 inches were good for nothing. He could just about move them but not do anything else with them. He could not give the shows his forebears had given and became nothing more than a freak sideshow. He kept going at this because his hands were useless for gardening and he knew nothing else. Nevertheless his heart groaned whenever he took the stage. He married a woman who he thought had means only to discover she was a con artist who wanted to exploit him and sell her quack remedies at the same shows. His garden managers occupied the premises until he sold it to them and they turned it into a cricket ground and pleasure park. The men who had lionised his father and grandfather turned against him when the Rule of Thumb Law was repealed due to the excessive size of the sticks now being manufactured. He was held responsible for removing their rights. Eventually his two surviving children turned against the freak and he died alone with his wealth in the hands of his wife. Women and wife beaters regarded this as justice. Men who did not beat their wives called it anything but.

Josiah did not ask to be born with thumbs so thick as to be useless. He did not ask to be the champion of wife beaters or their sworn enemy when the law changed. He just wanted to be a man and follow the family profession. The Ramjamites changed their names and moved away when they realised what they were related to. But in a way the family tradition continues to this day. The children may have adopted new identities but they still had big hands. The size reduced in time but the general tendency was still there. Eventually they produced another thick thumbed man whose history was disarmingly similar. He is called Paul Gascoigne. Josiah lies in Denham unmarked and unremembered. At least we can thank modern technology for sparing Paul Gascoigne from a similar fate.

An Underground Day

Today is MacManx Day. It does not appear in any official calendar. It is celebrated by a few lonely people on a little island in defiance of the rest of the world. Its story is a very instructive one.

Back in 1720 the people of the Isle of Man were ruled by the enlightened despot Lord Stanley. He may not have visited the island very often but his agents were generally lovers of justice. Several progressive measures favourable to the Manx people were introduced by him. The Manx had lost their native independence centuries before and had long had their identity seriously compromised by foreign rule. Now the solid sense of self of the locals was forging a quiet nationalism that reclaimed and reinvigorated the idea of a separate Manx people.

The problem began when the Laxey Woollen Mills showed a little entrepreneurial spirit. The Manx people were little known in the U.K. let alone internationally. The Scots however were much better known. One of the best known aspects of Scotland was the famous tartan. At this time however you could not find one in Scotland. Wearing and producing them had been forbidden as a result of the 1715 rebellion. So to supply the demand for tartans Laxey Woollen Mills invented their own. They called these Manx tartans. You can still find them today in various forms. There is a Manx National tartan and a Laxey Red and a number of other shades. They are just as good as the Scots ones. Therein lay the problem.

The Scots who once ruled Man descended on the island. Here was the only place they could wear a tartan with impunity and they could disguise their identities with this new Manx tartan. The locals were aghast. They had begun to believe in Manxness again and here were Manx themselves trying to imply that Manx and Scots were the same. Raiding parties attacked the woollen mills in the name of the Ellan Vannin nationalist party which at that time was an underground movement with a membership largely comprised of moles and worms. The men of Laxey had only one alternative. They recruited the incoming Scots as mercenaries and on September 5th 1720 fought the famous Battle of the Fleece against the nationalists. The wool workers had the advantage of the wool itself with which they wrapped the enemy up in large bales. The mills and the Scots triumphed. But now they had to press home their advantage to win the hearts and minds of the nationalist-leaning population.

The first step was to recognise the incoming Scots as a separate ethnic group and pretend they were also native to the island. They were known as the MacManx. Government officials who owed their position to votes bought by the woollen mill money started writing earnest tomes on the historic contribution of the MacManx to the island. This was quite an undertaking as only a small proportion of Manx could read at the time. It was also complete nonsense. Manx history has been characterised by its rulers underestimating the population and this was another such instance. No matter how much the locals were told that the MacManx were genuine Manx who just happened to have a Scottish background they would not fall for it. Eventually they boycotted the woollen mills and barred MacManx from their shops. Sensing that all their privileges were dissolving the government urged the mill to negotiate. In the way of things Manx the claims of the MacManx were quietly dropped and those who had been put in positions of influence were sent home to Scotland. But the tartans remained. How could they otherwise? They remained popular all over the world and brought the island much needed income. But the Manx parliament passed its own laws against wearing the tartan. Natives could wear one if they liked. But no Scotsman would be allowed to wear the Manx tartan as they were not entitled to it and no Scotsman could ever upon pain of death claim to be Manx to get hold of a tartan.

These measures were necessary and soon restored order. But the MacManx had been there just long enough to breed. A generation of Scots children lived on Man and knew no other home. The locals knew they were Scots and therefore refused to accept them as members of the community. This simply alienated them. Inevitably the children became a new MacManx community desperate to cling on to the false heritage of their forebears. They took the fight to the schools where they tried in vain to convince everyone that Ogham script was the original way of writing a separate MacManx language. They maintained their separate clubs and pubs and published illegal newspapers before anyone else had them. In time Scottish tartans were produced again and the rest of the world ignored the deviant Manx ones. Not the MacManx. They were exempt from the banning laws having been born in the island and wore the Manx tartans with pride daily. The rest of the Manx were not bothered about the tartans but the MacManx almost singlehandedly kept the woollen mills alive. To this day the MacManx insist on their non-existent traditions. In a few carefully guarded houses on the island people cast off their clothing and come out as MacManx. They drink their hybrid turnip whisky and dance their trawlerman's reels. They boast about their two and a half legs and claim descent from Douglas Peel Ramsey. They care not a wit about the ignorance of the outside world. They are MacManx and proud of it even if this means nothing whatsoever.

The MacManx are a distressed little group of people desperately trying to be something they are not to give themselves some sort of identity. It is very sad to behold. But it is far from the only example. To think of yourself as MacManx you only need to wear the tartan but to actually join them you need to know certain passwords and customs before they let you through the door. Just like it is throughout British industry in fact. You are not allowed to manage anything unless you can be the saddest of the sad little men who hide behind their jobs. Neither can you join the Freemasons. You may never have heard of MacManx Day. But you have all celebrated its equivalent. It is called the Bank Holiday. Think about it.

The Reason We Bother

One of the more distressing aspects of the modern world is the painful attempts by short people to try and justify their existence. No one has ever demonstrated that short people actually contribute anything to society. They are nearer the ground because they are designed to grovel to their genetic superiors and do all the menial tasks that are far beneath those who are closer to God.

It is now emerging however that there is some basis for the claim that short people fulfil a positive function. The notion is still hard to swallow for those of us who have to endure train carriages crowded with short people and are told we have to stand up when some of them are sitting down. Nevertheless in the interests of the Corinthian ideals of fairness and justice which tall people personify it is only proper to present the facts.

Our world is dominated by computers. These were developed by geeks at universities dreaming of new means of communication. Or so we were led to believe. Their critics used to mock them by saying that the early computers were in fact run by rabbits on treadmills chasing carrots and produced paper tape with holes punched in it by a little old man sitting at a desk. These ideas have now been dismissed as devices which are patently all electronic have been installed in every office and many homes. The question no one has answered is how we got to this stage. Computers did not develop on their own as they are incredibly stupid creatures despite having minds of their own. In order to develop the computer funding was needed and in order to get the funding working models needed to be produced. New financial declaration laws reveal that the penniless computer pioneers who are now multimillionaires spent enormous sums of money at pet shops and greengrocers when they had none to spare. Police records of the time also reveal that a number of elderly gentlemen went missing around the same time in the same locations as the pet shops and greengrocers where all this money was spent. All of them were under five foot four in height and indeed would have to have been to fit inside the mainframes of the earliest model computers. Draw your own conclusions. The little old man has every right to feel aggrieved that the subsequent development of computers has closed off the one avenue of employment and usefulness that he actually helped to create.

Man has always been fascinated by secret objects. Marcel Duchamp once created a work called Hidden Noise consisting of a ball of string held in place by two metal plates and four bolts. Inside the ball of string is an unknown object which makes a noise when you rattle it. Of course everyone wants to rattle it and that is the point Duchamp was making. The point is enhanced even further by the fact that no one knows what the object inside is. It is therefore all the more surprising that no one has bothered to ask until now why opera singers are so fat. Classical singers have always explained that to produce power and tone they need to be large. The gift of a singing voice is held in such reverence that no one wants to contradict those who have one. Yet not all opera singers are fat and the thin ones like Carreras are no less competent than those the size of Pavarotti. All singers know that smaller voices are sweeter and that there is a loss of lyric quality the more power you apply. The bellowing of fat opera singers would sound exactly that if it were not for the little people inside them producing the original notes. The vast bulk which projects this sound then comes into its own. Of course the short singers inside will never be credited but that is exactly as it should be. If the short receive any sort of recognition at the expense of the tall civilized society would collapse overnight and with it everything that right thinking people have every right to hold dear.

What else have short people done for us? Search the rolls of university degree courses. Indeed you can search the lists of any sort of educational courses. There are many art and design courses and many qualifications and professional titles which result from these. Nowhere is there a qualification or professional title of 'Speed Bump Designer'. Speed bump design is not an ancient trade whose mysteries are handed down through generations like dry stone walling. It is a modern phenomenon resulting from the increased speed and quantity of urban traffic. Only within the last generation has anyone designed speed bumps. But who does so? There are courses for even more recent professions like Gameboy Engineer or Living In Sin Guidance Counsellors. But there are no professional speed bump designers. Strangely enough the main locations of speed bumps are outside old people's homes. Now we know why the number of residents suddenly decreases when there are roadworks going on. No one will publicly admit that more troublesome residents are being periodically covered in concrete and soaked in tar. But it explains why every old people's home is registered as having several more beds than it has residents. Take a look at the community charge registers of your local authority if you do not believe this. A tall person is not tall enough to stretch two car widths along the road but two short people cover the full distance. The evidence is incontrovertible.

Of course if tall people wanted to sit inside computers punching paper tape or squat inside opera singers producing their notes or lie across roads and form speed bumps they could do so to a higher standard than short people. Such actions are however beneath our dignity. The fact that we have dignity and have every reason to have it is the reason short people were put on this earth. We can now see that in their place they do have some small uses. But the fact that they have a place is yet another confirmation of the essential superiority of the tall person. Why do other authors not say this? Because we have no actual need to justify ourselves. Short authors will go to extraordinary lengths to try and prove an argument. We merely exist and that is more than good enough for all you midgos out there who would not know a civilized value if it hit you in the face.

The Organic Cause And How To Further It

In certain upmarket shops you can find haircare products such as banana and kiwi shampoo. For most of our history we have got along without such things. Now by mixing exotic ingredients people are promising us unimaginable treasures through the wonders of nature. Presumably natural ingredients are more authentic even though the ones we use are not authentically used to make shampoo anywhere.

There will always be debate about these products. Are they genuinely better for you than the chemical based ones we had before or the native natural remedies we used to have? Some people who buy the products swear by them. They would swear in another way if they knew what they are actually intended for. The market they are aimed at is nothing to do with hair at all. But if people want to use them on their hair why not? A buck is a buck whatever form it comes in.

Mankind has long lavished a disproportionate amount of its income on pets. It is not uncommon for a village Post Office to be packed with dog treats with only a tiny counter for human matters. It is the only way the shop can survive. All kinds of pet accessories are readily available and the best way of avoiding obligations to other people without feeling too bad about it is to coddle a pet. But there is a limit. People have begun to grow self-conscious of their pet addiction. Which is where the new shampoo comes in.

Banana and Kiwi Shampoo does exactly what it says on the tin. It is used for shampooing bananas and kiwi fruit. People do this because they have started adopting fruit as pets. Sweet and cuddly fruit certainly is and it is also a clean slate. It has whatever character you say it has and does whatever you make it do. It does not excrete or let you down. Of course you have to keep the fruit very well for it to last long. No problem. Wax it, shampoo it, give it all the care and attention bestowed on live pets. Compete with the neighbours to see how long it will last. Talk to it and stroke it. It has been proven that the once alien practice of talking to plants is actually good for them. Surely the same is true of fruit? It all came from plants. Soon the fruit accessories market will take off in the same way the live pet accessory market has. Why should the Scotch Egg be the only one to get its own coat and playveg?

Fruit make more reliable pets but are rather predictable. Apart fom their tendency to die before you are bored with them they do not do anything spontaneous apart from the occasional roll off. There is much value in having a totally predictable companion but it is not so interesting. Hence the modern attempts to breed new strains of fruit. We are told that this is to develop new varieties more suitable for different climactic conditions. This ignores the fact that most of those who breed them have enough disposable income to buy the highly priced pet fruit. The fruit lasts longer because they inject it with vitamins and preservatives to make it a better pet. When they have observed the reaction of certain chemicals to certain fruit they can inject the ones with less predictable consequences into the fruit of their choice. Having a completely new and unpredictable fruit as a pet would be the ultimate status symbol for any highly paid research scientist.

The craze for live domestic pets lasted a long time. The craze for pet fruit will similarly captivate the world but ultimately come to a natural conclusion. The question is what will happen to the fruit after that. How could we ever go back to eating it? We do not eat cats and dogs here for this reason. Fruit will be left to rot on the trees and something else will replace it as both food and pet. Cannibalism seems popular nowadays what with the deluge of programmes about the lost Uruguayan Rugby Team which ate its dead companions and the press pictures of politicians eating fruitcake. Maybe that is the way to kill two birds with one stone. The way to resolve the crisis of an ageing population will be to start introducing old age pensioners into the diet and then when the numbers are down to manageable levels adopt them as pets. People say this is sick. We used to eat cats and dogs before they became pets. Being used by a nice family as either pet or food is probably preferable to being cast out of work and left to rot on a few pounds a week by the so-called welfare state.

We do not know as much about the pet fruit craze as we should for one simple reason. Pet fruit owners want to remain an exclusive band. They are happy for people to think that banana and kiwi shampoo is intended for human hair. If everyone collects pet fruit their little babies will be worthless. The same argument applies to many other exclusive offers 'not available in shops' which suddenly become available wherever we look. We all have a public duty to bring down such restrictive practices. Next time you see banana and kiwi shampoo ask for a demonstration. When they show you how it works on hair produce a banana or kiwi fruit and make them try it on them. The difference will be clear for all to see. Furthermore you can show your shampooed banana or kiwi fruit to all those in the street around you and tell them the truth. Let us see how many of you have the nerve to stand in the middle of a shopping centre and do this.