PHAUDE.com

Interested readers may wonder (Ha! There’s the conceited introduction of an arrogant optimist if ever there was one) about the disparity between the date of publication of the previous post and the reference to Radio 4 schedules of some weeks ago. (Really? You actually think that? Seriously? How interested can anyone be? You’re not even that interested yourself, you great baboon. It’s just lazy, lazy writing and I won’t stand for it. (Yeah, well so’s interjecting in parentheses to argue with yourself, you wanker. “Ooh look at me, I’m moaning tediously while pretending to find offence in that same tedious moan like a deconstructivist comedian, yet at the same time am still moaning. Tediously. Falalalala, I’m so self-aware. I’ve seen Stewart Lee do stand-up so I think this is a clever way to behave, falalalala.”) Don’t try to outsmart me, sunshine. You just remember who you’re dealing with here.) The answer is BT, the artist formerly known as British Telecommunications Plc. (Oh, for Gawd’s sake. I’ve had enough of this.) Why, oh why, oh why (I mean it: stop it) can’t they ever bloody manage to connect your phone and broadband when you move home (I’m getting the chloroform) without making you wait for weeks on end (I’m warning you: this is your last chance) for a service they routinely provi-mmmfffff…

INTERLUDE

A nondescript South London corner shop, the type you see on every street. By which, of course, I mean one that wasn’t actually on a corner at all. In the aisle next to mine, a grandmother, mother and daughter. Or do I mean two mothers and a daughter? Three generations of women from the same family anyway. I’m getting off track.

I ignore them easily as I try to find a loaf of bread that doesn’t look like it was baked more than a month ago. I want toast, not a paperweight, after all. I am a fussy consumer. I hear a shrieked protest.

“You can’t give her cat food: she’s not a cat!”

I glance round the corner of my aisle, trying not to seem too shifty. I contemplate the small selection of shampoos on offer as if I suddenly have a desperate urge to wash my hair. I think I’m being subtle but I’m probably as conspicuous as a man in a Stasi-issued trilby staring through two holes cut in a newspaper. It doesn’t matter. I turn, ever-so-nonchalantly, away from the Vosene Medicated and see the older of the two mothers, the grandmother if you like, looking at a tin of Whiskas. Her daughter has her hands on her hips. She is the one who has just offered this admonishment.

The older woman continues to look at the tin of cat food. She is lost in contemplation.

After an overly-long pause she glances up at her daughter.

“I’ll get it anyway.”

Guffawing, I have to turn away. I do hope she didn’t want to give it to the little girl in the pram.

1998 I think it was. A pub in Bristol. Can’t remember which one. I was having a couple of pints with my great friend Thos. Smoking, too. You could do that sort of thing then. A shabby gent, unwashed and hedgehog-chinned, charged up to us and tried to clamber under our table, eyes darting around. Hands constantly wringing, a pervasive smell of something unusual and chemical.

“Hide me: I’m a bank robber.”

He was clearly no such thing, unless a very unsuccessful one. The only thing he had probably stolen recently was the tube of Body Shop Hemp Handcream which he was perpetually rubbing into his hands like Lady Macbeth doing her out-damn-spot routine, flecks of the stuff spattering everything within five feet of him. We had a brief chat about his career as a professional drummer. This seemed perfectly natural at the time.

A member of the pub bar staff approached, asked him to leave.

Having clocked her, he turned conspiratorially toward us.

“You see that woman?” He leers at us. “If she stirs her tea clockwise, she’s ANY man’s.”

You can’t argue with that sort of thing.

A corner shop. Late at night. I am buying a pack of fags.

Two Asian men behind the counter, clearly having some sort of involved discussion. One turns from his friend to me.

“How many positions of bang are there in a woman? There must be at least 69, yes? They are numbered.”

I love that phrase, ‘positions of bang’. I’ve never had a chance to use it, though.

Kilburn. About a decade ago. I was stood in WHSmith, reading the newspapers. It’s what we did before the internet. That or the library. Libraries had more tramps and more of a crusty, fuggy aroma. Smith’s was cleaner, and had multiple copies of papers, so Smith’s was better. Smith’s even had magazines.

I was skimming through The Times, when suddenly a copy of The Sun was urgently flapped under my nose. I looked up. A troubled face was quizzing me, repeatedly stabbing a digit at the back page, specifically at a story about a footballer’s weekly wage.

“You see that number there?”

I did see. I confirmed as much.

“Is that a BIG number?”

It was somewhere in the thousands. I said, yes, it was pretty big, but such things were relative. The face looked momentarily less troubled. Then it shouted at me.

“A million! THAT’s a big number.”

I couldn’t deny it.

“Did you know that the sun is a million times bigger than the Earth?”

I wasn’t sure if anyone could be said to know such a thing but was also aware that an epistemological debate would clearly be neither relevant nor welcome. I told him I didn’t. He smiled proudly. He knew something I didn’t. That was enough for him. Knowledge is power.

For many people, one of the great pleasures in buying secondhand books is to find between the covers some evidence of a previous owner. Bookplates and carefully calligraphed names; inscriptions from friends or family; footnotes and angry annotations; opinions on torn pieces of paper hurriedly inserted at a random page or carefully pasted on to the endpapers; tram tickets and cigarette cards; reviews and author obituaries snipped from newspapers or journals; pressed flowers from some languid, long-ago summer afternoon when the book was last loved: such things somehow connect you with another time as well as another reader and offer an insight in to their past or perhaps even your own future in a way unique to this peculiar experience that causes certain book buyers to rhapsodise in similarly florid terms. Personally, I find it rather off-putting and annoying; if I want a book defaced I’ll bloody well do it myself. However, occasionally I will discover something that fills me with joy.

A couple of weeks ago I found a copy of The Moons Of Paradise [1], and I’ve been smirking ever since. It’s a book about tits. More specifically, as you will quickly deduce from its proper title, ‘The Moons Of Paradise: some reflections on the appearance of the female breast in art…’ by Mervyn Levy (Arthur Barker Ltd., 1962), it is a book about arty tits, a subject certainly ripe for exploration which, as far as I know, wasn’t tackled by the likes of EH Gombrich. (I could be wrong about that, of course; art historians are a notoriously rum bunch.) I’ve no idea how seriously Levy takes his subject either because I haven’t actually read the book, nor do I think it likely that I ever will. But then, I don’t need to; the previous owner of this copy has read it for me, and read it with a zeal and eye for detail that is little short of astonishing. Despite his obvious enthusiasm for the subject matter and the pains he has clearly taken in his annotations and additions, it seems he may have strayed slightly from the scholarly path on to the well-trodden promenade of seaside smut; but even if his amateur scholarship was academe’s loss (unless there is a secret Benny Hill Chair in Mammarial Studies at Cambridge), it is undoubtedly our gain. I think it best if I take you through the book page by page for a while.

We start with a quotation from Eugenio Coseriu [2], a mystic incantation and a bad French pun on the front endpapers:

sur les seins de l’epouse, on ecrase l’epoux.

A BRA, CAD, A BRA!

le seins-posium

Overleaf, the verso grants us further puns based around the word ‘seins’, whilst the recto gains two carefully-drawn papillary dots in each O of the word ‘MOONS’, the reflection that ‘Bust (bosom) is just sublimated bottom’ and the first hand-drawn bosom of many, labelled ‘From Great Divide to Cleavage’. I think you may be beginning to get the picture…

There are 31 further drawings of pairs of breasts on the dedication page (along with the inscription ‘tats for tits’),

and then the fun really begins. From here onward almost every single page of this 140-page book has a newspaper clipping, postcard, or picture inserted, each of which, as you may already have guessed, is… well… is like this:

and this:

and this:

You get the idea. Oh go on then; one more:

Several of the newspaper clippings are from 1970, so it seems fair to date this extraordinary endeavour of thematic archiving to around that point. From our hyper-sexualised vantage here in the early 21st Century, this book’s new contents seem rather innocent. Preserved for the last forty years as a memento mammary (I’m not going to apologise for that; it gets to you, this book; I’ve already had to stop myself talking about trips down mammary lane), it may seem little more than an oddity, a curious relic of one man’s unusual obsession, but I think that as an historical document (yes, really), this book might have some value. Discuss.

[1] Freudian typo: I originally wrote ‘mons’ instead of ‘moons’. Make of that what you will.
[2] No, me neither. Sorry. Google him.

I was never an enthusiastic cricketer as a youngster. Incompetent, I suppose would be the word to describe my batting and bowling. Fielding, too, come to that. Actually I rather liked fielding if only I could sit in the long grass as far from the crease as possible like Vivian Stanshall’s odd boy and hope the ball was never thwacked in my direction. Competent cricketers would make demands like ‘middle and leg’ when stepping up to bat. I had no idea what they meant. They may as well have been as Jake and had an extra leg as far as I was concerned. I always hoped to be bowled as quickly as possible so I could go back to the pavilion for a doze. Lack of team spirit, that man.

Many thanks to lovely Sue for resurrecting this site from whatever dusty recess of the internet in which it was temporarily stored.

This time round there will be pictures. Lots more pictures. I have a lot of old stuff to stick up here. Stuff like this:

I love inappropriate humour. To me there are few greater pleasures than having to stifle giggles at a time when decorous, ‘adult’ behaviour is demanded. The aftermath of real instances of accidental slapstick, especially the glorious way people attempt to regain their composure immediately after having fallen over (the best instance of which I saw being a pinstriped office-worker slipping in a spilled delivery of strawberry ice cream outside a branch of Baskin-Robbins in Marylebone: I defy anyone not to have roared as he floundered and cursed in a mountain of pink goo on the pavement), young children innocently swearing, or the simple joy of a good, old-fashioned, unseemly remark (e.g. Dr. Graham Chapman’s at Dachau): all are guaranteed to make me laugh.

But it’s very seldom that you find yourself reduced to gales of laughter in a cemetery. In North Sheen (aka Fulham New) Cemetery in SW London there is the most bizarre 20th Century epitaph I’ve seen, one which caused a fit of teary bemusement when I read it. Here it is:

Joan Winifred Keats

21.10.28 – 23.6.74

“For cystitis I was treated wrong

For more than three months too long;

Until cancer developed beyond control,

When euthanasia took its toll.”

The verse itself is bad, there’s no doubt of that – the last line in iambic tetrameter even recalls Butler’s famed Hudibras, the model of bad verse – but it’s the content that continues to baffle me. That this poor woman seems to have suffered horribly from a misdiagnosed cancer before consenting to a mercy-killing at the age of forty-five is of course no cause for merriment, but what on earth could have possessed her family to have erected this as a monument? It’s just weird. Did she write it herself and demand it be chiselled in to her headstone, an early version of Spike Milligan’s “I told you I was ill”? Is it even jocular? Am I being horribly insensitive in finding any amusement in this at all? Why else, though, would cystitis and euthanasia be mentioned? And such a bad poem being attributed to someone called ‘Keats’ is surely too much of a coincidence, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Someone please tell me more. There’s a story here and I really want to know it.

Regrettably I didn’t have a camera with me at the time of my visit and I can’t remember exactly where the grave is – I think sections 1c 2c 3c are a good place to start but be warned my memory is a little hazy. I’m sure it was around there somewhere.