(Cackles With Malicious Glee)
You'll see, you'll see how thoroughly clever/tangential/bewilderingly obscure (delete where applicable) I am, in a bit. And NO that is not a typo, it's a staggeringly funny pun I'll have you know.
You see, today we have a Theme, which hasn't happened for a good while (code for "I can't remember when and can't be bothered to look") and that theme is "WAGON". Because I've been perusing all about the TRAIN and concomitant WAGON in "Transportation On The Western Front 1914 - 1918" and good lord aloft, how many wagons did the British army use by late 1918?
We'll come to that in a minute. Art!
How is "Wayne" pronounced? That's wright, "Wain", and what do you think is Old English for "Wagon"? Why none other than "Wain", Jane*. Thus the English surname "Wainwright" is one who works upon wagons. So you have John Wain in "The War Wain", kind of.
Okay, from 1967 we jump to 1918 and all those wagons. We mentioned brake vans yesterday, so that's them out of the way. That leaves 54,000 other wagons being used on the railways by the end of the First Unpleasantness, in 110 different makes. There were box wagons, rail-carrying wagons (surely ironic in some way?), tank-carrying wagons, ballast wagons, petrol wagons, a multiplicity of wagons. Art?
It may not be apparent, but this type of wagon was open to the elements, as this was the most versatile version, being the easiest to load: all you had to do was dump stuff into it and Hay Pesto! there it was, full. If the cargo needed protection from the elements then a tarpaulin would be stretched over it, until British soldiers stole the tarp. They had been carrying out such thievery since the Boer Unpleasantness, apparently, the rascals. Indeed, in "Field Guns In France" the author boasts about how these tarpaulins "blow into" his encampment from the stores depot next door.
One solution was to have folding covers on the wagon, a solution considerably more expensive than tarpaulin and one which risked British troops forcibly removing said covers for constructing dug-outs or making fires.
Motley! Make like a dog and - get your wag on!
Which, as any fule kno, means to refrain from drinking alcohol. Your Humble Scribe wondered, rather, where this phrase came from, and checked "Brewer's" (guffaws at the irony) which seemed to be reaching, to be frank. They had it that the origin lies with South Canadian miners and loggers (harvesting the raw materials for WAGON!) who worked at remote sites that made the back of beyond look like Hong Kong at rush hour. Art!
Thus their water had to be brought in by wagon, overland, and so by extension you were "on the wagon" for your drinking (and washing?) water. Except this strikes Your Humble Scribe as unlikely. If you are out in the untamed wilderness, what is going to be abundant? Streams and rivers, not to mention rain. Besides which, what's to stop the lumberjacks from bringing in a gross of beer bottles each to keep their insides wet, hmmmm?
I may go into this further. Or I may not. I'm fickle like that.
"Waggoner's Walk"
You who hail from the unhallowed shores beyond This Sceptred Isle and whom are less than 40 years old won't have the faintest idea what Conrad is wittering on about. Even I had to look this one up.
Man about to eat microphone?
Okay, WW was a radio soap opera broadcast by the BBC between 1969 and 1980, focussing on a road in London <spits> called - ah, you guessed already - "Waggoner's Walk", which is a bit ironic as normally a waggoner (one who uses a wagon) would be riding, not walking, except that "Waggoner's Ride" is confusing as the natural rejoinder would be "Do they?" and we're getting off track again. Art?
Conrad would say a giant lumberjack with the world's biggest chainsaw is the murder suspect, as Phil Cook must have been at least 300 feet tall.
Anyway, the program seems to have been a kind of "anti-Archers" as it set out to tackle Modern Life And All It's Problems Set In The Modern Babylon, and one hopes it dealt with those irredeemable reprobates who pass port to the left, along with spelling criminals, fans of Nutella and pineapple. Sadly, this commitment to being edgy and dangerous (as "edgy and dangerous" as Radio 2 got, which is to say not very much) and urban angst seems to have irked some of the senior heads at the BBC and it got cancelled as a cost-cutting measure. Sort of 'No wheels on your wagon' as an epitaph.
Wagon Wheels
Conrad is not sure if this item of confectionery is native to The Pond Of Eden or is an import from overseas, so let us illustrate the point being made. Art!
These are a snack that my scornfully-dismissive mater described as "A triumph of quantity over quality" and she might have been correct back in the day (a day several decades in the past). Conrad was never that struck on them when he could have scoffed them, and now I don't have the choice**. The maker of these has doubtless kept the price as it was, and graduallllllly decreased their size, and O! here's a skeptic with photographic proof. Art!
Finally -
This is going off at a tangent to an item that we haven't even covered yet. However, said Item would probably run to several hundred words and we're nearly at the Compositional Ton, so it's going to appear in detail in a later blog, maybe at the weekend. Okay, so we've covered a British radio soap opera, which is the very definition of 'shoestring'; let us now flit across the wide Atlantic to South Canada and a soap opera called -
This one cost £75,000 per episode, probably as much as WW for the whole of it's 11 years and 2,842 episodes.
Let us abruptly change track and ask the question: whose pitch line for a television series was "Wagon Train - to the stars"?
Answers on a postcard to: Conrad, Apprentice World Dictator, c/o The Mansion, Sodom-On-The-Wold, Greater Gomorrah, The Pond Of Eden. Or in the Comments, which I'd prefer, actually.
I'll provide the answer tomorrow, unless I don't, because - once again! - I'm horrid that way.
* From the Old Dutch "Waegn"
** SHAKES FIST AT DIABETES.
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