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Dear Diary,
I must have a word with the Manager. I still cannot find this damn priesthole containing the Fortean Times Unconvention for the life of me. I cannot be expected to supply the Manager with good ideas if I cannot find the bounder at any one point in time, if you know what I jolly well mean. I am getting a bit doubtful about the Manager. We left him in charge but he’s proving to be a hot bone short of picnic, if you ask me. In think I might have a word with him eventually about his attempt to turn the Fortean times into a kind of Vanity Fair for eccentric yuppies, if you know what I mean. Frankly, if it goes on like this much longer, we’ll all be back in Fulham bedsits writing to 25 frog-watchers on manual typewriters back from the pawn shop, don’t ya know.
Requesting yet a third cup of coffee from the dusky serving wench, I received the rather jocund reply “him boss gone.”
Such pigeon-Kensington came as no surprise. I was ready for anything after the shock of seeing Hamilton “mid life crisis” Smythe of the Times blacked up for liberal England and trying to do the Watusi with his calves quite arthritic from sitting on Arts Council sub-cultural ethnic creative dance committees.
Thus sit I baffled in JIG-JIG, a Kensington High Street coffee shop. I am brimful of inspirations, yet unable to locate this priest hole where the last dying generation of frog-watchers await my arrival in breathless anticipation.
My talk is intended to show people what Charles Fort is all about, and I want also to give the Manager my latest Good Idea.
By Jove, I’ve got it, Eureka! I cried out, quite alarming the wife who struggled to the kitchen for a glass of cook’s plonk, something she normally would not touch with the proverbial barge pole. Put a UFO on the front cover, screamed I! That would get the punters in, and then, when they’ve parted with their four quid, have Prod, Tonto and the Village Post Mistress trash the silly stupid UFO on the inside, what? Cheers all round! Yes, some might see through it but as long as their shillings have crossed the mat it doesn’t matter.
Such a thrill to have a good idea! I haven’t had a good idea since I mended old aunt Kemp’s kitchen shelf with some sticking plaster which later fell into her aquaria and quite changed the life of Freddie the Marbled Salamander, whose changed immediately his coat colour to that of the sticking plaster. Rather Fortean, I do believe.
Quite upset the Captain, who was just back from the Somme with some merry tales of his glorious adventures in the name of our king, may God bless him.
Talking of Fort, the Master of all things small and insignificant, circumstances odd and bizarre, there is many a truly fortean volume found in the guest bedrooms of your typical country-house. The important question of choice of bedside books for such guest rooms is rather neglected in our time, or so it appears to me. In my experience, there are always about a dozen of such books lying at an angle of forty-five degrees in a kind of pig-trough. Should such a selection not appeal upon invitation to a country house, I carry always with me my two favourite tomes in a secret compartment in my trunk, made specially for me by the stout Mr Gross, the village tanner-cum-blacksmith, about whom more later. These volumes are the Admiralty List of Wireless signals for 1930 and the Naval Annual for the year 1913. When faced with the very off-scouring of the library downstairs, (books considered by our hosts to be good enough or bad enough for the spare room.) these two volumes offer solace before sleep. I read passages out aloud to myself in private, but I am careful however to lower my voice lest I disturb my hosts. Bless them, they are in the main horse and doggie folk, and are hardly of the disposition or calibre to sympathise or understand such elevated instincts. Here is one of my favourite passages from the latter volume
Three docks were delivered during the year, two of 35,000 tons capacity; one, built by Messrs. Cammell Laird & Co., Ltd., has been moored at Portsmouth Dockyard, and the other, constructed by Messrs. Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson, Ltd., in the Medway. Both have been tested, the former by the Neptune being docked in her, while the Medway Dock took the battle-cruiser Lion when drawing 31 ft. 6 in. of water, and displacing 30,415 tons. The third dock has a lifting capacity of 1500 tons, and is intended for submarine and torpedo-boat craft. Three other small docks are approaching completion-one, for destroyers, is for Harwich, and one, for submarines, is to be stationed at Dover, and the third, for destroyers, is for Portland. Another new floating dock is provided for in the programme of 1913-14.
I chant such passages before sleep it because with such things I reach parts of my extended self in time which were still alive long before I was born, and these are parts of me which will last after I am dead. These chords then, then represents home of a kind, although in this incarnation I understand very little of the matters discussed. I choose technical, military, and mechanical things of the past century because they are matters I know absolutely nothing about. I am like the man who so remembers everything that he has to turn to an imagined wall (something he cannot have seen, and therefore knows nothing about) in order get some sleep. Concerning the former volume, here is how I enter my dreams: GENERAL POST OFFICE COAST W/T STATIONS SUPPLY OF WEATHER INFORMATION TO SHIPS ON REQUEST. Arrangements have been made with the General Post Office by which ships at sea may obtain reports of local weather conditions at certain Weather Reporting Stations. Weather enquiries from ships may be addressed to any Coast W/T Station asking for: (a) A weather report from any Meteorological or Signal Station given in the following list; or (b) A weather forecast from the Meteorological Office, Air Ministry, covering a period of the next 12, 24, or 36 hours, as the case may be (but not exceeding 36 hours), for any area or any route:-=;, The enquiry from a Ship for (a) should be made as in the following example: Lands-End-Radio Lands-End-Radio = indicate weather Torr Head = Baltic " (5 words). Meaning : S.S. Baltic asks Lands-End to obtain weather report from Ton Head. The enquiry for (b) will be made usually as in the following example " Niton-Radio = indicate forecast 24 hours Channel = Balmoral Castle." Meaning: S.S. Balmoral Castle asks Niton to obtain from the Air Ministry a forecast for the next 24 hours of weather in the English Channel. Enquiries may be varied, but in principle it is desirable to restrict the length of the message to a minimum number of words.
The charge for a weather report or a weather forecast is 7s. 6d. A report of weather conditions can, if desired, be combined with a forecast in a single message from the Meteorological Office, Air Ministry ; but the charges will be the same as if they are supplied separately.
Such things are my very blood and bones, yet I know nothing of their matter; I hear their infinite music, and that is sufficient to me.
Of course this is not to everyone’s taste, and I would hesitate certainly to recommend such favourites as these for the spare bedroom in any west wing. The selection of such guest-bedroom books is one of the most vexed question of our time, and it is one which Charles Fort would have appreciated.
If I may, I should like to suggest a few rules for the choice of books for the spare bedroom. First of all there is the size of the book to be considered. It must not be too big or too heavy to hold with comfort. The type should be good and clear. The contents must not be too exciting, nor the stories too long. Either tends to repel sleep. But at the same time the bedside book must not be selected for its soporific qualities. Books of short stories, essays, poetry, are suitable, as they can be closed at any moment when the reader wishes to go to sleep.
Now it would be presumptuous for one person to offer to another advice about the books to place in his guest's room, but here I am giving three lists of the books which I suggest are suitable for the guest bedrooms. I do not expect everyone to agree with any one of these lists, but they will show, I hope, that good hosts, take some trouble and forethought over this all-too-neglected department of hospitality.
First Guest Room
Evans: On Foot in Sussex Sonnabend: Theories of Forgetting Hudson: Hampshire Days. Porges: A Fictional Musum of Imaginary Truths Larwood and Hotton : History of Signboards. Tradescant’s Rarities Whitaker's Almanack.
Second Guest Room
Cobbett: Rural Rides. Duff: Handbook of Hanging. Aubrey: Scandals and Credulities. Totell’s Miscellany(1557 edition)
Third Guest Room Kingsmill: Anthology of Invective and Abuse. Hakluyt: Discourse of Western Planting, 1584. Squire: Songs from the Elizabethans. Eha: Naturalist on the Prowl. Moritz: Travels in England. Beachcomber: Stuff and Nonsense. Hudson: Nature in Downland. Walter de la Mare: Desert Islands.
The last book on this list is, I admit, a little large for bed reading, but it is so delightful to read that it cannot be excluded. I am painfully aware that many of the books in the above lists will not meet with the approval of all or perhaps any of my readers.
There is nothing in the world more personal than the choice of a book. I once travelled with a friend by car to Monte Carlo and back. This was the late Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, and he read the same book in bed throughout the trip. This was Bradshaw's Railway Guide. Over this stupendous compilation, a work entirely unintelligible to me, Lord Montagu used to pore by the hour.
To test his knowledge I would set him problems. I might say I wished to travel from Blue Anchor in Somerset to Bonar Bridge in Rosshire, and without a moment's hesitation he would give me the hour at which the train left Blue Anchor, when and where I should change trains, and the exact time of arrival at my destination in Scotland. This, of course, is an extreme case, and I would not dream of placing a railway time-table by the bedside of a guest unless I was positive that he was a keen student of siderodromology. As a guest myself, many times I would chant a page from the Admiralty List of Wireless Signals whilst occupying guest bedrooms of the most extraordinary character which Charles Fort would have loved. For instance, I once spent a delightful week end with an ennobled descendent of one John Rann, alias Sixteen String Jack, who was executed November 30th, 1774 for a robbery on the highway near Brentford. This nobleman (a great grandson of Rann, alas impoverished through taxation which was to pay for the dreadful housing estates creeping up on the horizon, whose radios are unfortunate born upon the summer breeze) had only one spare bedroom. This space was not only the most bookless space ever conceived, it happen to contain the gathered relics of a most extraordinary life sailing the seven seas. Imagine my delight chanting my favourite passages from the Admiralty List of Wireless signals whilst pinned to walls and ceiling was the positively Fortean collection of:
An Elephant's head with the dentes molares in it; an animal like an Armadillo, but the scales are much larger and the tail broader; very large flying fishes; a seahorse; bread of Mount Libanus. A cedar branch with the fruit upon it; what appeared to be a two-headed penis in a bottle of preserving fluid; a Siren's hand; a Chameleon; a piece of iron, which seems to be the head of a spear, found in the tooth of an elephant, the tooth being grown about it; the Isle of Jersey drawn by our King Charles the Second; a piece of wood with the Blood of King Charles the First upon it; the horn of a unicorn; the face of the Devil in what was claimed to be a slice of fossilized Jacobean marzipan, and much Japanese painting, wherein their manner of hunting and working is well drawn; stuffed beavers taken in the River Elbe; a picture of the murder of the Innocents, done by Albrecht Durer; a genuine royal turd (under glass) captured by the heroic Naval apprentices of Greenwich; divers strange fowls; a Greenland boat; the skins of white bears, tigers, wolves, and other beasts, and what said to be the shorn head of Cromwell, looming in the bedside candlelight for all the world like a large shriveled grapefruit, And I must not omit the garter of an English bride, with the story of its adventures carved in fumed oak. I remember myself that it was long the fashion in England for the groom to take off the said garter and wear it in his hat, I remember that long ago this seemed so strange to some German guests of mines, that I assured them that I had divers times wore such a garter myself.
Not an untypical trove I might say, to be found within some of the older country houses. Nor is it untypical for the provenance of many of what we today consider Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces to wend their way back through hodgepodge collections such as these.
I suppose I shall have to go home now and make a phone call to one of the wind in the willows folk who might know where the Manager and the frog-watchers are. But nurse never usually lets me near a phone. I find them rather vulgar things and extremely difficult to use, especially the ones without wires. I lose them, I shout at them, or inadvertently drop them into bowls of pudding mix, where they are found later by cook, screaming at the Bakelite smell from the over, no pun intended. Perhaps I shall write a letter to the Manager. I have his name scribbled down somewhere on my blotting pad. Or perhaps I shall ask nurse! She knows everything. Perhaps she even knows where the Unconvention is being held.
But perhaps I might try and find it again myself.
Meantime, as I wend my way, I leave you all with the following Fortean thoughts, more calming than a mulled Chateau Montelena Estate Zinfandel, Napa 2002, to my mind (stored upended, not vertical).
WEATHER BULLETINS. page 351
MADAGASCAR. 3442 Diego Suarez (FIL). WAVE: 500 kc/s (600. TIME: (A) 0830. Broadcasts en clair the general atmospheric situation in Madagascar and the weather forecast for the day. 3443 Majunga (1+10). WAVE: 500 kc/s (600 m.). TYPE: B. 3444 5445 3446 TIME: (B) 0430, 1600. Synoptic observations of 0400 and 1500, respectively. FORM OF MESSAGE: See No. 3443 (II). OBSERVATION STATIONS Helleville (Nossi Be) (0400). Diego Suarez (0400 and 1500). NOTE.-See No. 3443 (II). TIME: (A) 0900. See No. 3442 (I). TIME.--(B) 0,500, 1630. TIME: (A) 0800. See No. 3442 (I). TIME: (B) 0415, 1615. Observation Stations Helleville (Nossi Be) (0400). Zaudzi (0400). Diego Suarez (0400). Majunga (0400 and 1500). NOTE.-Ships can obtain on request any meteorological information in the possession of Majunga; Diego Saurez and Tamatave W/T stations. This information is furnished gratuitously. By way of exchange, and to ensure reliability in the issuing of storm warnings, ships in the vicinity of Madagascar should forward without delay meteorological observations to the nearest coast W/T station, sending the message en clair (French or English), or in the International Meteorological Code. These messages will be given absolute priority, and will be retransmitted to the meteorological service at Antananarivo. Tamatave (FIS). WAVE: 500 kc/s (600 m.). I. Synoptic observations of 0400 and 1500 respectively. FORM OF MESSAGE : See No. 3443 (II). OBSERVATION STATIONS: St. Mary (0400). Tamatave (0400 and 1500). NOTE.-See No. 3443 (II).
Tamboraso, Cotopaxi, stole my heart away...
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