The End of the Road

Lowering the Tone

(or raising it with a few dam' jokes).

The Hawker's Pot Show opens today at the Brewhouse Theatre and Arts Centre, in Taunton, as part of an exchange organised by Somerset Art Works and Stroud Valleys Artspace.  It will be on for two weeks and is sharing the gallery space with work by Somerset artist, Hazel Holman.  Opening times are from 10am to 6pm. 

I will be there from Wednesday to Saturday on each of the two weeks, and will be offering some live hawking and potting (performances and readings) as well as having a suitcase full of postcards for sale.

I hope to see you there!

The Hawker's Pot Suitcase

The Hawker's Pot suitcase (stocked with an array of jokes) made its first appearance at the Shambles market in Stroud on Saturday.  Here is a photo of it by Helena Petre.  Many thanks, Helena!

                                                                                                      ©Helena Petre   

Dead Letter Day

 Nice Ideal ...

That affirmed Platonist, Algernon Swift, makes an interesting discovery: by adding an S to certain words he can increase the number of abstractions in the world.  Thus:

phonelines become phoneliness  

headlines become headliness

and

trainlines become trainliness 

(a quality in which, of course, all trains partake).

Better still, he discovers that by adding a T to other words he can live in the world of Ideal Forms.  Thus, he no longer takes a turn in the shrubberies but in the shrubberiest.   These are not blackberries he picks and puts in his mouth but the blackberriest.  And when he collects together a large number of anything, they do not form any old pile of random rubbish but the congeriest. 

Swift writes to Reverend Hawker, to tell him of his discovery.

Horror Ensues ...

But that materialist, Reverend Hawker, is having none of it.  “You eel!”  he writes by return of post, in a letter which reduces the world to a model of mechanical reproduction.  

And this he does merely by removing the S from various abstractions.

Where once it was the qualities of Manliness and Womanliness that defined the human race, now they are replaced by the mechanical horror of Manlines and Womanlines.  

In this barren landscape, Beauty is reduced to Lovelines and spiritual virtue to mere Saintlines.   

And should a person seek to assert his individuality by being a little bit human and untidy, this untidiness is immediately subsumed into the mechanical process and reordered into Slovenlines.  

And should he cry out at his sense of isolation, it will not take him long to realise he is merely one of many standing in long lonelines  -- in long appalling lonelines that stretch as far as the eye can see.

Swift is disconsolate.

Consolation arrives ...

Swift lies back on his couch and yearns for the soft touch of comfort.  Which is not long in arriving, for soon comes stealing into his mind the conception of

             Nature at her loveliest

             A garden at its prettiest

             Womankind at her comeliest

and

             Female form at its shapeliest.

By discreetly removing the T from the end of each of these, Swift finds his couch surrounded

             by lovelies,

             by pretties,

             by comelies

             and shapelies,

among whom he reclines as if he were a knight in a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and sinks into sleep  with a milk-drunk baby’s look of utter satisfaction on his face ...

Intolerable Cutlery

"FORK CRYING OUT LOUD!" he shouted.

Fox-Ache Hall

Algernon Swift visits his old friend, Oliver Blastet, at the magnificently dilapidated Fox-Ache Hall.  It is a peculiarity of the house that every piece of news that arrives at its master’s table is unfailingly bad and is greeted with renewed exasperation.

Breakfast comes in late and cold.  Oliver asks the meaning of this, and is told the butler has absconded with the cook.

“Ah, Fox-Ache,” Oliver mutters. 

Swift, however, discerns in his friend’s voice a hint of nostalgia – a nostalgia for all the past and ongoing despairs of Fox-Ache Hall – for the very fabric of a place where nothing ever turns to any good – for home, where the falling-apart heart is ...

And so it is as, through the day, Oliver is greeted with one piece of bad news after another 

--  the trees in the plantation have been turned to powder by a mysterious disease

-- a band of itinerant thieving librarians have stolen the rare first edition of Crotchet Castle from the library

-- the West Wing of the house has subsided so far that it is now frankly more easterly ...

to each of which Oliver replies murmuringly:

“Fox-Ache”

that Swift knows there is nowhere his friend would rather be than here at home at Fox-Ache Hall – where the general failing of everything is as reassuring as the arms of an old overcoat, where the call to action is faint and faraway over the heavy dark hills, and over everything hangs the dull sad ache of foxes in the wood.

Prepared for the Dark Ages

The Hi-Visigoths

Leanings

Algernon Swift tries an experiment with his natural inclinations.  He wears a shoe with a doubly thick sole on his left foot and now finds he inclines to everything to the right of him, and nothing to the left of him. 

All goes well, until he falls in with Mavis, that delectable object of his affections, who insists on walking down the street on his left side.   What to do?  The resourceful Swift solves the problem by walking backwards  slightly to her right and a few steps ahead of her, thus making his inclination towards her clearer than ever.

One More for the Film Buff

And next week we’ll be hearing about the completion of filming on Cannery Row*.

One for the Film Buff