Not that any of you out there actually bothered to Comment or anything in the Comments section, WITH A COMMENT, like*. So I have to go by how many of you are reading BOOJUM! which is, I have to say, a gratifyingly large number. Mostly non-Pond dwellers, who appear to like it when I extoll the virtues of British, because what else can you do except admire a nation that enshrines rolling eggs down a hill?
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| DEATH TO EGGS! |
SO! I shall be going on about more British. For example, and allow me to breach two of our three guidelines, there is rather a furore going on in South Canada at present about President Trump (okay, that's Politics and Current Affairs bearded in their lairs). If a similar situation occurred here in the Pond of Eden, we would not proffer unseemly displays of raw emotion. No. We would write a stiffly-worded letter to The Times, and, if interviewed by a roving correspondent from the Beeb, would express "indignation bordering on annoyance".
| Stiff Upper Lip is what we have. |
Anyway, that has little or nothing - okay, nothing, you got me - to do with the rest of the blog for today. So, let the motley commence!
"Father Brown" By G. K. Chesterton
Well now, can you get more British than this? Also, since the Father here is of the clerical type, that's our third taboo out the window. Oh well. Rules made to be broken and all that. Father Brown is, lest you be unaware, a crime-solving Roman Catholic priest, whose original milieu was at the fag-end of the nineteenth century. The creation of one G. K. Chesterton, and whose stories I have read.
| This, for the younger readers, is a "book" |
There is also a television series, too. How was I not aware of this? Because it's a rule: with middle-age comes an increased interest in the Genteel Murder, where a whole novel might very well be devoted to solving the riddle behind a single person's death. James Elroy, by contrast, would have a dozen bodies by page 17, at least half the responsibility of the
The television series features the lovably crumpled Mark Williams as Fr. Brown, and - surprise! - Deamy as the local police superintendant. We at The Mansion know him as Deamy, you see, as we rub shoulders with important people like actors and < Mister Hand redacts a long self-congratulatory waffle>.
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| Mark in middle, Deamy at left |
The setting is an interesting update, too. The Fifties, allowing the shadows of the Second Unpleasantness to fall over people and circumstance. There is a resettlement camp of Poles near Kembleford, since a lot of these folk chose to settle in the Pond rather than return to a country infested with Sinisters. Especially as "That little sod with the moustache" a.k.a. Stalin was running things.
Ah yes, the Fifties, when Utility and austerity were the order of the day. Rationing for some items was still in force, as evinced in -
"An Underworld At War" By Donald Thomas
This constitutes the grimy and unlikeable face of the British war effort. Here a coincidence - the writer J.L. Hodson is mentioned several times in the work. Who was he? The writer behind "Desert Victory" is who, one of the better documentary efforts about the war in North Africa and with a splendid narration that encapsulates Received English Pronunciation. He used to stooge around during the Blitz and see how people struggled to cope; or, in the case of those with money, how they didn't struggle all that much.
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| A bit of a con - it's in black and white |
Coupons! It was a war effort run on coupons, for food, clothing and petrol amongst other things, all in issue from the government, so naturally they became instant targets for theft and forgery. They all needed to be returned after use to be destroyed, and you may have already foreseen the flaw here: with millions - TENS of millions - of people using umpteen different types of coupon, there were gigantic amounts to be processed, checked and disposed of. The staff responsible simply couldn't cope, so fraud not merely ran rampant, it skipped, jumped, hopped and variously gambolled rampant.
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| A coupe on. Close enough |
Finally
One for all you conspiranoid loonwaffles out there, and a nod to that Facebook default description about astronomy. Behold!
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| Curiosity - on MARS! |
Yes, it's the Mars rover Curiosity, in a touching self-portrait taken after it had drilled into the Martian surface to take rock samples. I know what you're thinking -
"If that's Curiosity - then who took the photo!"
* For me, this is quite subtle
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