The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Fifty years of Christmas Crackers
All the best bits from John Julius Norwich’s legendary commonplace book
How beautiful, I have often thought, would be the names of many of our vilest diseases, were it not for their disagreeable associations. My old friend Jenny Fraser sent me this admirable illustration of the fact by JC Squire:
So forth then rode Sir Erysipelas From good Lord Goitre’s castle,
with the steed
Loose on the rein: and as he rode he mused
On Knights and Ladies dead: Sir
Scrofula,
Sciatica of Glanders, and his
friend,
Stout Sir Colitis out of Aquitaine, And Impetigo, proudest of them all, Who lived and died for blind Queen
Cholera’s sake:
Anthrax, who dwelt in the enchanted wood
With those princesses three, tall, pale and dumb,
And beautiful, whose names were
music’s self,
Anaemia, Influenza, Eczema.
And then once more the incredible dream came back,
How long ago upon the fabulous
shores
Of far Lumbago, all of a summer’s
day,
He and the maid Neuralgia, they twain,
Lay in a flower-crowned mead, and garlands wove,
Of gout and yellow hydrocephaly, Dim palsies, and pyrrhoea, and the sweet
Myopia, bluer than the summer
sky:
Agues, both white and red, pied common cold,
Cirrhosis and that wan, faint flower
The shepherds call dyspepsia. –
Gone, all gone:
There came a Knight: he cried
‘Neuralgia!’
And never a voice to answer. Only rang
O’er cliff and battlement and desolate mere
‘Neuralgia!’ in the echoes’ mockery.
USEFUL PALINDROMES:
What other words would spring to the lips when breaking the news of the death of a prize herd of cattle, smitten with infective epilepsy?
Stiff, O dairyman! In a myriad of fits!
Dr Barnardo making out the menus:
Desserts I desire not, so long no lost one rise distressed.
The rebuke of the high-principled lady to her rich Norman lover:
Diamond light, Odo, doth gild no maid.
Holorhymes are whole lines which have the same sound but different meanings. For some reason, they seem to go better in French. Louise de Vilmorin gave me two beautiful ones:
Étonnamment monotone et lasse
Est ton âme en mon automne, hélas!
and
Gall, amant de la reine, alla tour magnanime, Gallament de l’arène à la Tour Magne, à Nîmes.
This second one is by Victor Hugo. Some time ago an entrant in a New Statesman competition made a bold stab at a translation. I noted it, but idiotically failed to note the author. If he sees this, I hope he will forgive me.
Gall, doll-lover, ‘ghost’ to royalty at right hour, Galled all over, goes to royal tea at Rye Tower.
Now it’s the turn of mnemonics. All the best ones should enable one to remember basically useless information – still more useless, ideally, than the first 36 Roman Emperors. Paddy Leigh Fermor gave me the first two lines; and some time afterwards, lying in bed with a cold, I made up the rest.
A truant calf calls noisily;
Great obstinate! Vile veal!
Thus dominating nervousness Through hoarding apple-peel. Mid-August come, persistently, Don-Juans, sex-suffused,
Coerce mature hetairas Anti-socially misused.
Go, go my boys! Go pandering! Descend green Arno’s valley! Give chase! Among those flowery peaks
Can’t countless numbers dally?
The initial letters give the key to the Emperors: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, Pertinax, Didius Julianus, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Macrinus, Heliogabalus, Alexander Severus, Maximin, Gordian, Gordian, Maximus, Balbinus, Gordian, Philip, Decius, Gallus, Aemilianus, Valerian, Gallienus, Claudius, Aurelian, Tacitus, Florianus, Probus, Carus, Carinus, Numerian, Diocletian.
Gibbon has some cheerful information regarding the Emperor Gordian:
His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.
Benjamin Robert Haydon at the coronation of George IV on July 19 1821:
The appearance of a monarch has something in it like the rising of a sun. There are indications which announce the luminary’s approach; a streak of light – the tipping of a cloud – the singing of the lark – the brilliance of the sky, till the cloud edges get brighter and brighter, and he rides majestically in the heavens. So with a king’s advance. A whisper of mystery turns all eyes to the throne. Suddenly two or three rise; others fall back; some talk, direct, hurry, stand still, or disappear. Then three or four of high rank appear from behind the throne; an interval is left; the crowds scarce breathe. Something rustles, and a being buried in satin, feathers, and diamonds rolls gracefully into his seat. The room rises with a sort of feathered, silken thunder.
My friend Enid McLeod, who has a cottage on the Île de Ré, has sent me an extract from her local newspaper reproducing a letter addressed to a typewriter shop by a dissatisfied customer:
Monsixur,
Il y a quxlquxs sxmainxs jx mx suis off xrt unx dx vos machinxs à écrirx. Au début j’xn fus assxz contxnt. Mais pas pour longtxmps…
THE HEDG-HOG
When he findeth Apples or Grapes on the earth, hee rowleth himselfe upon them, until he have filled all his prickles, so foorth he goeth, making a noyse like a cart wheele.
Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts, 1607
REFLECTIONS ON LIFE:
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
Shirley Temple
The rain it raineth every day
Upon the just and unjust fella,
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just’s umbrella. Charles Bowen
As you grow old, you lose interest in sex, your friends drift away, your children often ignore you. There are many other advantages of course, but these would seem to me to be the outstanding ones.
Richard Needham
Julius Drake sends me this little gem, from a letter written by
Anton Chekhov to his friend Alexei Suvorin on Oct 26 1895:
Tolstoy’s daughters are very nice. They adore their father and have a fanatic faith in him. That is a sure sign that Tolstoy is indeed a mighty moral force, for if he were insincere and not above reproach the first to regard him sceptically would be his daughters, because daughters are shrewd creatures and you can’t pull the wool over their eyes. You can fool a fiancée or a mistress as much as you please, and in the eyes of a loving woman even a donkey may pass for a philosopher, but daughters are another matter.
My friend Bob Guthrie has sent me the following extracts from an American parish magazine, culled over a number of years:
This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs Lewis to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.
At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be ‘What is Hell?’ Come early and listen to our choir practice.
Some years ago the late Maggie Jencks sent me a copy of the earliest – but for all I know still official – translation of the Japanese Highway Code, as delivered to her grandmother in Yokohama when she became the first woman in Japan to hold a driving licence.
RULES OF THE ROAD IN JAPAN
At the rise of the hand of a policeman, stop rapidly. Do not pass him by or otherwise disrespect him. When a passenger of the foot hove in sight, tootle the horn trumpet to him melodiously at first. If he still obstacles your passage, tootle him with vigour and express by word of mouth the warning, “Hi, Hi”. Beware of the wandering horse that shall not pass and take fright as you pass him. Do not explode the (explode) exhaust box at him. Go soothingly by, or stop by the roadway till he pass away.
Give big space to the festive dog that makes sport in the roadway. Avoid entanglement of the dog with your wheelspokes.
Go soothingly on the grease-mud, as there lurk the skid demon. Press the brake of the foot as you roll around the corners to save the collapse and tie-up.
From The Cork Examiner:
Donnachie’s Bar, Cobh. Due to the sad death of Paddy, the Bar, to all intents and purposes, will remain closed during our grief; but so as not to inconvenience our esteemed customers, the door will remain ajar. ’Tis what Paddy wanted. Thank you. The Donnachie family.
For all compilers of commonplace books, epitaphs are the most perilous of pitfalls. If given half a chance, they overload the whole collection. But they provide too rich a vein of poetry, humour and fantasy to be omitted altogether, especially ones like this:
Here lies the body of Lady O’Looney, great-niece of Burke, commonly called the sublime. She was bland, passionate, and deeply religious; also, she painted in water-colours and sent several pictures to the exhibition. She was first cousin to Lady Jones; and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
The more laconic also have their charm, like that in the curious Georgian Gothic church of Tetbury in Gloucestershire, which reads:
In a vault underneath lie several of the Saunderses, late of this parish: particulars the Last Day will disclose.
John Betjeman loved to recall the remark of the architect H S Goodhart-Rendel to Osbert Lancaster on his first visit to the Parthenon. After gazing at it in silence for a considerable time, he at last gave his opinion:
Well, not what you’d call an unqualified success, is it?