Strutting Tuffty’s Diary

It’s very annoying. don’t you know. People tell me politely that I am no longer the editor of the Fortean Times. When I ask them who the editor is exactly, most say they do not know. Others say there is just a Manager now. In order to resolve this situation I ordered a search to be made for the said or claimed Manager. I decided to choose Prod for the investigation. Since this mysterious Manager I believe could possibly be a hoax, I chose our resident UFO Annihilator, because he is one of the best investigators of hoaxes in the world, if only because his stage Yorkshireman act is a hoax in itself. Using a hoax to investigate a hoax is a bit of a Postmodern idea for me, probably the sad influence of that lunatic buffoon Bennett (spit) that I tell everyone to ignore.

Anyway, I set them orft with their old Polytech butterfly nets and Scargill jam-jars to find the facts of this mysterious Manager business.

As I have said, I don’t understand it at all. Once there were two editors. Now it appears there’s one Manager of the Fortean Times. There an Associate Editor they tell me, but he is also Associate Editor of Magonia magazine.

Which leaves me very confused indeed, since I cannot recall the names or Fortean track record of either of them.

I decided to act. First I quickly made a telephone call from a rather twee Home Counties fellow who always talked endlessly about the best hoaxes, deceptions and con-tricks of past years. But he was of no help, as usual. Secondly, I decided to ignore the advice of my old nurse that I must never go out quite alone under any circumstances. She I presumed based her advice upon the being aware of the dangers of the increasing number of horseless carriages about in the greater metropolis.

With these two personal triumphs in mind, I made my way to the Commonwealth Institute for Uncon 2004, intent on asking my fellow frog-watchers about this mysterious Manager.

Unfortunately, since I had stayed up late last night at a bit of private jamboree in Bloomsbury, I felt rather sleepy and forgetful.  The occasion was a rather risque tango tea dance at Fergus-Ponsonby’s old place, and things got rather out of hand, what with today’s gramophones and all that caper. I mean yes indeed, I have thrown a bread roll or two in my time, but the people there were doing what they call jiving. Jiving? What a thing to do! Can you imagine me jiving?

But this jiving appeared to be a kind of Fortean key to something or other. Upon entering  the main hall of the Commonwealth Institute, just off Kensington High Street, I was astonished to find that the place was full of whirling Dervishes, no less.

My Gord, I muttered to myself, our jolly Fortean frog-watchers have gorn all ethnic, and they didn’t tell me. Nobody tells me anything these days.

Being careful and polite (you don’t mess with your Johnny Dervish) I stopped one twirling Afro-British person whirling in his tracks by enquiring of him in broken Tutsi sprinkled with a few fragments of provincial Swahili if indeed he was the said Manager I sought.

I remembered these strange-sound bits of vocab from chats with my old Empire & Colonial grandfather, Brigadier Buller-Montgomery. He had described these things as possibly being useful in my later life, and knock me down with a flintlock, he was jolly well right.

I remember the old Brigadier saying to me whenever you have trouble with whirling colonials and the Gatling happens to be jammed, always before imminent death, try asking them the score before tea at Henley. Many a Dervish said he, has been stopped in his frenzied jiving motions by such a question. The lives of many a subaltern have been saved said he again, if only because Don Bradman and Dennis “Brylcream” Compton are regarded as fertility gods in certain parts of the Dark Continent.

Whereupon I did this very thing, only to find that the jiver in question was Pethers-Marchant, a blacked-up chum from my old school. He was on an Empire and Colonial Awareness weekend, and Prince Harry was expected at any moment, apparently done up as your proverbial Hottentot, but he had promised to leave his swastika arm-band at home. The event, said Pethers-Marchant (the first “a” in the second part of this name was changed to “e” in the 19th century to prevent being associated with Trade) was sponsored by the Mayor, Ken Livingstone, one of those appalling plebian fellows who always seems intent on making us all Aware of something or other, like weights and measures, statistics and unemployment figures and facts and fictions and such like crappolla from the lower-middle class.

Anyway, Pethers-Marchant told me that I must have made a mistake, because all the frog-watchers as he called them were over at some priest-hole in the Euston Road. I turned down Pethers-Marchant’s offer of a “Get Involved” weekend in Brent, which to me didn’t sound very jolly.

Obviously disappointed, He wandered off, whirling to his wireless, as was his wont.

To tell you the truth, it all looked like a bit of an odd little caper to me. There was only one black man proper there as it were, and he was taking the money with a smile. Giving me a wink and a nod, he told me that the said whirling dervishes were all blacked-up members of the Arts Sections of the quality press and the magazine Time Out. Apparently they were all participating in a “Getting it Together with Afro-Britain” Media Scheme. 

Well, what with last night’s jiving and all this whirling, I was a little disoriented. However, I set orft down Kensington High Street to find the priest-hole that Pethers-Marchant had spoken of.

It was a sunny day and many people I noted carried those same said wretched wireless sets. The damned things burst out from every doorway and bus stop with their brainless plebian clamour.

Now let me tell you something. Of the three arch-enemies of conversation the wireless is the most pernicious. Not only is talk out of the question while its clamour goes on, but it is quite impossible to read a book, at least any book requiring the reader's attention. I have known houses where the wireless was, as it were, nailed to the mast, or permanently on tap, from after breakfast until late at night, when the house­hold quite dazed, deafened, and stunned, sought peace and quiet in their beds.

An over-cultured male voice, of great volume and pene­tration, informs the room, empty or full, of the current price of mutton at Nottingham, the results of professional football matches, or the state of the weather between Iceland and the North of Scotland.

Suddenly a hot jazz breaks in to throb or jar your eardrums. An SOS call maybe inter­larded begging that some devoted son who left home seven­teen years ago, and who has not been heard from since, should go immediately to an address in Liverpool, where his mother lies dangerously ill.

The wireless is all very well in the home if it is taught to know its place. I am not sure that a wireless should not be like a good little girl, seen but not heard. It would not be half or a quarter so bad if the programme was studied beforehand and only a good concert or an interesting talk switched on. Mr. Joseph Thorp, who is no enemy of the wireless, hits the nail truly on the head when, in his little book " Design for Transition," he asserts that what is " em­phatically-needed is instruction in the technique of knowing when to switch off the wireless. – as important a branch of culture as switching it on.”

Roman games, played with pencil and paper after tea in country houses where there are children are useful to pass the time. But a really good game is shove-ha’penny. Young or old, “Varsity blue” or “literary gent,” highbrow or lowbrow, they all can play it, and have an equal chance of winning.

Above all this wireless din, thoughts came to me of last year’s Uncon. I remember instead of hopping colonials, I gazed with great delight upon as staunch a collection of  beautifully fustian English antiquarians as ever I did see beyond Lemington Spar. I have never seen anything like it since just before the Great War, when during a delightful sabbatical in Bath, I came upon a memorable collection of Lloyd Georges in Monmouth Place. They all made their own clothes, with wing collars fitted by a little ex-corporal of the Manchester Regiment in Potters Bar.

Gazing upon the Uncon hordes, for a moment I was back in time on Monmouth Street, though updated, as those computer Jonnies call it. I usually hate updates of any kind, but on this occasion I was impressed. There before my very eyes I remember, was nothing less than the late flowering of the body of English conservative Bohemianism. Thrilled, I gazed with delight on as fine a chorus line of gingerbread tuffties as ever surely graced the native sward of Merry Albion.

There were frogatts and toad-warblers, foxters, folk-macaroons, and dairy maids; there was a scaramouche, three hobbits, and a leaping Don or two. There was even some untermensche pongo no doubt fresh from some God-forsaken old polytech, who claimed to have found what he called Reality.

Rejoicing, like a good Fortean, I took notes immediately about what must have been the finest collection of English walking-wounded as ever graced the playing fields of Merry England.

I was so proud by Jove. Here were truly the finest minds of plain honest Wind in the Willows volk.

I was proud too of the way we had managed to keep such a clean and worthy crew over the yars. Not a tekkie, a cyber, or a Postmodern anywhere to be seen. And none of that Bennett post-toastie rubbish. If I hear the word metaphor again I shall stamp and scream and I last did that when the great sow died giving birth in Wadsworth Hollow. Neither were there any ufonauts, abductees, or people who think they can see through a wall a thousand miles away, and no purple robed moonfaces waving scrolls from New Age mountain tops

But these are memories now.

Wereupon, with the sun on Kensington High Street, and a jocund air about, I set out looking forward to finding the said priest-hole, and joining our Uncon crew, of which more later.

Toodle-pip for now,

Tuffty

I must admit I left the pseudo-Dervishes at the Commonwealth Institute with some concern about the state of our nation. Just as I turned left to go up Kensington High Street, my mind still full of colonial misgivings, I was struck by a thought of the late Hon. Charles Rothschild, the banker. Apart from the making of money, he had for his other preoccupation the collecting and study of fleas; now I call that a true Fortean interest if ever there was; it is what our beloved Charlie is all about. Moreover, Charles Rothschild, was no dilettante with his fleas, but before his death had become one of the greatest living authorities on that branch of ento­mology. His agents searched the whole habitable and uninhabitable globe for specimens of these wingless insects for his collection. A man I met in France during the Great War, who was in charge of a school of sniping at Mont-des-Cats, told me of an experience he once had with Mr. Rothschild.

In civil life my sniping instructor was an animal and bird painter and professional collector of natural history specimens in the north-west of Canada. One day, while he was skinning a bear which he had shot, he saw and captured an enormous flea the size of a sixpenny piece. It was the largest flea he had ever seen, so he preserved it in spirits and dispatched it by registered post to Mr. Rothschild as he felt it must be a unique flea.

In due course he received a warm letter of thanks from Mr. Rothschild stating that the bear's flea was indeed a treasure, being unknown to science, and the writer enclosed a cheque for the sum of five shillings in payment. My friend from Canada told me that: he never cashed that cheque with the famous signature on it, but had it framed to hang up as a memento on the wall of his log hut.

With the fading of that fine Fortean, memory, the present came back with a bit of a shock. I suppose there’s nothing like a crowd of blacked-up white “whirling dervishes” from the Creative Arts sector to leave you in a bit of a liberal funk. Well, I sat down for coffee in Ken High, and looked again at my notes for my audio-visual show of Fortean Objects for the Fortean Unconvention. Here are some of them.

This is what Charles Fort is all about, and I guarantee that there won’t be a single piece of any of that Bennett high falutin’ rubbish.

Mother Mary with baby Jesus

The Virgin Mary's face on a toasted sandwich prompted a bidding war on Internet auction site eBay. By Sunday it had reached £15,000 and the sandwich had been checked out by more than 400,000 people. But eBay bosses have now removed the item, saying it could be a prank. Florida housewife Diana Dyuser, 52, claims she grilled the holy toast ten years ago. She said last night: "I have had blessings since she has been in my home – I won 70,000 dollars at a casino. Its preservation is a miracle.”

Madonna and Child in Pork Scratching.

Devout Catholic Aaron Dodgson, 26, was in a Coventry pub in 1997 when he found this snack in the shape of Mary cradling baby Jesus.

 William Hague

Tory leader William Hague appeared on a slice of toast in Aldingbourne, West Sussex, shortly before the 2001 election. Hague was soon toast himself, if you remember.

The Scream in a Spud

Balti takeaway owner 37-year-old Sunu Miah found a copy of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream in a spud. “It’s definitely a magic potato,” said Sunu at his South London restaurant in 1998

Here is an image of the busty model Jordon on a naan bread. This was served to 28 year old curry fan Tony Cox, as he celebrated his birthday in Wolverhampton three years ago.

 My Uncon Presentation is about such tricks, hoaxes, and deceptions. I like to find the jokes and the simulachra. They’re most amusing. There’s a Bennett in every woodpile. It all reminds me of an age of parlour games by gas light. That’s why I like Charlie Fort. He’s a parlour game man, is Charlie. The things he found are all jolly spiffing fun. You can play these funny old Fortean games even these days, finding odd little things, that’s what Scrabble-board Charlie (as I call him) is all about. Hippy antiquarians and real-ale folklore gurus love him to death.

But let me tell you now about the very first Fortean Unconvention. One summer during the Phony War as it was called, I decided that the cricket club needed a new pavilion. I decided to hold a Fortean Carnival and Fete (it was not called Uncon then) to raise funds to build a new pavilion. Various people were invited to organize side-shows, swings, roundabouts, coco-nut shies, and all the other attractions which are so popular at country fairs.

Inspired by the ideas of Charlie Fort, I (perhaps rashly) decided to run an exhibition of unusual pets. A marquee was hired with trestle tables for the cages and glass aquariums.

However, my attempts to induce the townspeople to lend their pets for exhibition met with poor response. After a week’s hard work, I had only a goose named Jim, two cream-coloured guinea-pigs, and a green parrot. I cast my net a little wider, but it proved no light task to capture, pack up, and transport by car enough of a menagerie to fill the tent. 

Threepence was charged for admission, and each visitor was handed a card on which was printed:

Fortean Unconvention Number 1

Theme:  Unusual Pets

Date:    Spring, 1940

 please place the number here ..............of what you consider to be the most unusual pet exhibited.

Signed..................

At the end of the show the votes were to be counted and the pet that received the largest number was to be presented with a prize.

Contributions to the exhibition included the following:

Giant toads from Trinidad.

Edible frogs.

Green wall lizards.

A pair of English sand lizards (which produced five lively offspring during the show, to the great concern of the local inspector of the R.S.P.C.A.) Fire-bellied toads.

Venus and Adonis-changeable toads.

Geckos.

Bull frogs. Water terrapins.

Newts, crested, Alpine, and marbled. Giant water beetles.

Smooth-clawed water frogs from the Zambezi River.

Green tree frogs. Slowworms. Salamanders. Stick insects. Midwife toads. Minnows. Sticklebacks. Golden rudd. Fancy goldfish. Sun-fish. Bitterling carp. Common roach.

Unfortunately, George the phalanger, (our one small pouched marsupial) being asleep all day, could not be exhibited. If he had he would, without doubt, have been a hot favourite for the first prize.

We had some filthy language from the parrots, and our badger escaped to cause terror amidst the assembled wheelchairs, but altogether our show was an unqualified success, and a constant stream of visitors poured in, only one of which demanded his money back, and he was in liquor.

Like a good note-taking Victorian Fortean, I started to compare in detail the character and habits of our exhibits with the dispositions and social status of the owners. I was about and finding a truly remarkable set of Fortean correspondences, when the Beadle, the Squire and Lady Forbes-Bishop called me over to decide on our prize-winner. At that very moment, an unsporting Nazi bomber flew over our heads, guns ablaze.

I’ll tell more about this swinish Bosche intruder next episode.

Suffice it to say that the vicar was found with his head in a rabbit burrow, old Miss Prentice-Smythe fainted through trying to put her gas mask on the wrong way around, and the squire got his face slapped by the nubile Miss Prentice for jumping on top of her for her “protection.” All the toads escape in the melee, and it took days to track down the parrots. Our phalanger and badger were never seen again, but there were reports of pouched marsupial sightings for well nigh months after VE day.

Such were the Fortean days of yore.

Soon after this event, Harris the butler announced that the carrier had called and left some goods from the auctioneers. We hurried out to find piled up in the stable yard a great heap of strange objects. What could it all mean? Then suddenly the riddle was solved, for tied to one strange object was the sale ticket with No. 143 printed clearly on it. I had made an idiotic mistake, for I remembered then that I had told the auctioneer's clerk to bid for No. 143 instead of No. 134.

This pile of delightful junk would have pleased old Charlie Fort no end, for that is what he was, being the most delightful collector and philosopher of unique and largely comic junk. I look upon him as the last great Victorian collector of bric-a-brac, objet d’art, antiquities, and old curiosities.

And this is what we .got for our five pounds. Obviously, a person or persons of some class.

A folding trench periscope, A rather lovely blood-letting bowl in smoked oak full of atrophied leeches, a rather fine personal whipping frame in carved and polished beech with a coat of arms upon it, a half-completed hand-written letter (dated 1896) to the Bishop of Bath and Wells accusing him of being in homosexual league with the Devil, which I can well believe of that particular incumbent. There was also a "View of the Old Leisure Centre, Brentford," signed “John Cunstable” (sic), a fine copper egg-boiler stamped 1914, fifteen stout brass stair-rods, one large circumcised penis carved in bone, traced with all the battleships of the Spithead Review, 1912. In addition, I had inadvertently acquired one 78rpm gramophone record of a certain G.H. Eliot (NOT the poet!) who for his sins, called himself (if you remember) before the Great War “the chocolate coloured coon.” In addition, there was a night commode arm-chair with stuffed seat upholstered in cretonne, a list of Marconi Wireless stations bookmarked with a fried egg, a small jar labeled “navel fluff of his true beloved,” and a well-thumbed oilskin packet of old corset illustrations.

And I thought I’d bid for a set of the pre-war Radio Times, a copy of the Horse and Hound for 1922, and an elephants-foot hat-stand full of genuine Victorian umbrellas and a shooting-stick which once belonged to a disgraced Bishop. 

Charlie Fort would have loved it all.

65 years later, I swallow the last dregs of my Cappucino, full of Fortean nostalgia, I take up my copy of the Independent and set out to find the wretched priest-hole in the Euston Road those blacked-up Anglo-Dervishes had told me about where all my beloved Fortean frog-watchers were assembling.

Cordially yours,

Tuffty

To me a Fortean thing is synonymous with some tiny English thing, some minor curiosa which can be identified and catalogued. The work of Charles Fort is a blessing to an archive mind such as mine own and my that of my friends and admirers, we being the last group of Victorians and Pre-Raphaelites in Merry England, I suppose. Fort is all about nomenclature and category and definition of extraordinary and unique things, that is things that no-one else in the world takes the slightest notice of, which keep out the mensche when you come to think of it. Fortean culture has nothing to do with that modern political nonsense. You cannot say Fortean “politics” any more than you can say English intellectual, Irish pornography, or military intelligence.

Fort’s listing and naming activity makes one feel what shall I say – special. Yes that’s the word. That’s the way a person of quality should feel, don’t ya know. I hate anything collective. I mean who would want something that everyone else has? That would be like using a communal bath towel, surely.

Lots to do this month. The water to change in the ponds, the inmates to feed with meal or garden worms, or exciting hunts in the dense undergrowth for missing friends. There is garden­ing to be done without stooping, a dead limb of some giant o£ the dwarf forest to be lopped, ferns which have spread too far to be pruned and trimmed.

Of all the inhabitants of my terrarium the most attractive to me are the toads, and the bigger they are the more I cherish them. Therefore I love best of all the huge giant toads which inhabit damp, cool, shady nooks in the forests of Central America, Brazil, and Trinidad. Our toads are named Mr. and Mrs. Watson.

Toads are found the whole world over; they inhabit all countries except Iceland, Madagascar, Australia, and the islands of the South Pacific, and are very much alike in character. Almost every toad has the same proud, supercilious expression, which gives it such an air of dignity and aloofness and discourages undue familiarity, a beast true to the most sacred English nature.

Some bounders beyond Calais however find fault with his pendulous belly which lies spread out beneath him, but to the true toad-lover this aldermanic feature only adds to his majesty. It is but in recent years that the toad has come into his own. For centuries the toad was maligned and wrongly accused of many crimes of which, with our better knowledge of his private life, we now know him to have been innocent. To-day only the most ignorant believe little Fortean myths and legends claiming that toads suck the milk of cows or turn wine into vinegar.

In the past my favourite has been accused of robbing bird’s nests of their eggs, not wan­tonly like the members of the British Oologists' Association, but to eat. Many a toad in the past suffered torture and lingering death on the assumption that he possessed the evil eye or cast spells on man or beast. Nothing was too bad to believe of the toad. It was said that its spittle drove dogs mad, or that its breath was poisonous. I myself have heard a child's nurse protest when I allowed her little charge to stroke a pet toad. She screamed that this would cause warts to appear on the child's hands, a perfect little Fortean tale indeed!

But the toad of the past was not considered to be always and altogether malignant. It was well known to our forefathers that when toads were properly prepared and applied or swallowed, they formed an infallible cure for the gravel or dropsy, and would stop nose bleeding and soothe pain. I know from my own experience that a toad slipped beneath the pillow of a sufferer from typhoid fever would bring down his temperature forthwith. Fort would have loved such folklore even though some of it was cruel. It has been said for example, that if a toad was hung by one leg in a stable, the horses were safe from any fear of infection, and no rat would dare to enter. Moreover, precious stones often lay hidden in the heads of toads. To magicians, sorcerers, doctors, and wizards the toad was an unfailing ally.

A good Fortean factoid is that the earliest record of a toad being kept as a pet occurred in 1619, and ended disastrously for its owner. In the house of the French philosopher Vanini, some busybody discovered a live toad in a glass bowl, and reported this positive proof of witchcraft to parliament, which at once issued an edict condemning the philosopher to be burned alive at the stake.

Another early friend of toads was the painter John Down­man. Fort would have liked his curious pursuits. His life was full of vicissitudes. During the height of his success as a fashionable portrait-painter, he suddenly left London to retire to Town Malling in Kent. Here his chief amusement was the taming of animals. His greatest achievement in this line was to train two toads to come to his call, and then at a word of command a dove and a robin would mount on the backs of the toads and be carried about by them.

I have never achieved any success like that, nor been able to persuade our Beverley to walk down the garden path mounted by a robin. History records that his neigh­bours at Town Malling looked askance at the painter from London as an eccentric, which his method of curing a cold by walking in wet grass with naked feet did nothing to modify.

News about toads crops up in all sorts of unlikely places. Who would expect the subject of toads to be on the agenda at the deliberations of a city council? Yet readers of the Hanley Evening Standard, July 25, 1934-I like to be precise about dates-will remember a paragraph reporting the' proceedings of the Arts Sub-Committee of the Stoke on-Trent City Council. The meeting had been convened to express the thanks of the City Council for certain gifts presented to the City Art Gallery. 

Amongst the various objects of art accepted and handsomely acknowledged there were not only several engravings and a large oil­-painting, but two natterjack toads, the gift of the Rev. E. A. Elliot, and a photograph of the members of the Stoke Council, given by Alderman H. Leese.

The Arts Sub-Committee of the Stoke-on-Trent City Council is to be warmly congratulated. By throwing open their doors to toads and other live animals they have gone a long way towards brightening our art galleries, and I will wager that the number of visitors to the Stoke Art Gallery has gone up by leaps and bounds.   

Altogether this action is most praiseworthy, though the honour of being the originators of this idea for the encouragement of the study of art belongs to others. The pioneers, I believe, were the trustees of the Tate Gallery, in London, who not many years ago accepted from Mr. Siegfried Sassoon a gift of two live goldfish for exhibition in the fountain in the central hall of their gallery.    

One hopes that this further step in the right direction will be emulated by the trustees of the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and other London picture galleries.

Both the history and the natural history of the toad are of absorbing interest. Quite lately a delightful book was published in Paris, “La Vie des Crapauds,” by Monsieur Jean Rostand, which is devoted entirely to the fascinating batrachian. No one intending to keep a toad should fail to procure a copy of the book, which has been translated into English under the title “Toads and Toad Life.” How fashion changes!    

The great naturalist Cuvier, whom one can scarcely imagine to have been squeamish over crawling animals, described the toad as being both “hideous and revolting,” while Gessner declared “its glance is enough to make a man turn pale and ill.” But what a different character does the toad get from his admirer and biographer, Monsieur Rostand ! According to this distinguished French naturalist, to the toad belongs the honour of being the first walker in the world.

Just consider the importance of that! The toad taught man to walk, and from that first lesson man has gradually progressed and improved until he has become able to travel from England to Australia in three days! Surely the discovery of walking should be cause enough for us to revere the toad, but he did more, for he was the first of all animals to have five fingers to his hands; an innovation, Monsieur Rostand sagely observes, very significant. As he points out, there is far greater difference between the fishes and the toads than there is between the toads and man.

What a humbling Fortean thought for all of usl

But I tend to become garrulous over my favourite. I am like some amorous swain who loves to talk and talk about his sweetheart, never suspecting what a bore he has become to others. But I like to think that what I have written for the Telegraph will not have been all in vain, and that I have won a few more friends for that strange reptile whose yearly life, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts, six months for sleep, one for love, and five for eating.

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. It really is too bad. 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. I think I might have a word with him eventually about his attempt to turn the Fortean times into a kind of Vanity Fair for fashionably 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 come back from the pawn shop, don’t ya know.

Requesting yet a third Cappuchino 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.

This 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 as mine own.

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.

Borges: 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.

It consisted of an elephant's head with the dentes molares in it; an animal like an Armadillo, the scales being 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 was 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 (from Princess Margaret, and thankfully 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 mine, 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.

Merry Christmas to all Anoraks, Train Spotters, and Frog Watchers beyond the Sun and Moon!

I am now going to try and find the Manager

I am late I am late!