Here you go:
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| Wednesday lunchtime |
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| Thursday afternoon |
| The bright and shiny city of steel. |
The English Civil War
Diane Purkiss' very detailed book is not some dull, dusty, dessicated tome that is a chore to read. Au contraire, she packs it with colour and incident, making things come to life and proving that the past is, verily another country. Rather than follow the over-frequent "There was a battle. Then there was another battle. In between these two battles there were other battles. These battles went on for a long time -" approach she expands on what people did for entertainment or leisure or meat preparation.
Yes, meat preparation. Anna, look away now!
Bull Baiting
It was believed that baiting a bull made the meat taste better. So - it would be tethered to a post and have pepper blown up it's nose - all the better to enrage it - and it would be set upon by specially-bred dogs - Bulldogs. Then it would be chopped into bits and eaten**.
It sounds like something out of the Monty Python Cookbook but it did happen, frequently, too. Eventually the disturbance it caused made it pass out of favour, which must have been a relief for the chaps carrying the pepper. And the bulls, too, one doesn't wonder.
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| Not entirely sure what this is - but the bull seems to be winning |
No! Not a drink. Nothing to do with "Glee", either, thank you very much Google. This is a card game, apparently, although to Conrad it sounds like a kids television programme from the Seventies about the alien Gleek and his human friend Pink.
Which is a way of admitting I have no idea how the game is played.
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| Bleep and Booster. Close enough Oh, I'm a card, aren't I! Do you get it - o you do |
This is mentioned as a Christmas dish, and it doesn't have any plums in: dried fruit such as currants or raisins were called "plums" back in the seventeenth century. You stewed a leg of beef, 2 quarts of wine, 2 quarts of beer (that's a gallon, combined), cloves, mace, nutmeg, mace, apples, 1/2 pound of currants, 1 pound of raisins and some prunes. Remove the leg of beef and voila! Plum pottage. If you finished that lot off you would be plum, in the sense of plump.
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| What the heck, close enough |
"The Drop"
Another new film poster as seen on a bus. Conrad will review it according to the ancient rules of BOOJUM!***
Given the concept of a drop, that is, a very small mass of water defined by stearic effects (surface tension to you), and that we are talking singular, this must be a very short and boring film. "Ooh look! A drip is forming on the kitchen tap! Now it's fallen in the sink" FIN. All of five seconds.
Or - could it be about the journey of a single drop that falls from a raincloud? That would be longer by several minutes but just as boring.
Damn my eyes, Hollywood really must be desperate!
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| The film's tragic denoumont |
"Nativity 3: Dude Where's My Donkey?"
Conrad hasn't seen Nativity or Nativity 2 but, given the "hilarious" title of the film poster above, he hates them with an almighty passion.
Nativity 3 is a horror film, I have decided.
Never mind that it's a cartoony kid's Christmas film, it's still horrific - because enough people went to watch the first and second to encourage the studio to make a third!
| "Rare Exports": the sort of carnage-filled horror film about Christmas that Conrad enjoys! |
Conrad's Blood And Peppermint
As I have surely told you by now, Conrad's blood is composed of lava and nitromethane, with the leftover bits filled in with liquid sodium and iron plasma. Unfortunately I cannot radiate body heat safely during the working day, or my work colleagues would roast like chickens. Neither - and this is an omission you will scarcely credit - are there any cooling ponds of liquid ammonia^ available.
So - by four o'clock I am usually desperately gulping down pints of water, or guzzling mints in order to avoid having to gulp 2 quarts and 2 quarts of water. Today I did both, and - ouch! That water was so cold it hurt.
This is due to the menthol in mints fooling your nerves into thinking that you're ingesting a very cold thing - or rather the "transient receptor potential cation channel subfamily M member 8" does.
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| This! This is what happens if Conrad gets a nosebleed |
Pooh Sticks - The Hideous Truth!
You remember the game "Pooh Sticks", don't you? Of course! Chucking rocks into the stream, and any objects that happened to be passing underneath your strategic position on the bridge. Great fun, unless you happen to be one of those objects. Like Eeyore.
Let's look at this positively evil game from the victim's point of view, shall we?
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| The criminals at work |
"Ask a "friend" to bounce you into the river and then contemplate your greyness as you float downstream. Get another "friend" to shock you back to reality by dropping rocks on you as you float under a bridge - just for fun, of course."
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| Their innocent victim. |
Thank you, Eeyore. BOOJUM! will be taking this to the International Criminal Court.
* Yorkshire.
** After being cooked, of course. They weren't barbarians!
*** These are: immediately jump to conclusions, avoid looking it up on IMDB, make leaps of intuition and generalise madly
^ I know. Shocking!
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