The common thread

The common thread

After the last of our children moved out, my wife and I sold from the three-storey terrace in Hammersmith, which had been the family home for almost 27 years, and relocated to a large, four-bedroom house in Wheatbarry. 

Many couples our age want to downsize to a smaller place. We were quite the opposite. Having lived at close quarters for almost three decades, Heather and I both appreciated the increased personal space afforded by our change of address.

Our new home had previously been occupied by a pair of elderly sisters who were both disabled. It came fitted with a stair lift, and one of the smaller ground-floor rooms had been converted into an assisted bathroom. The estate agent who showed us the property suggested that we rip the former out. The latter, he advised my wife, could be converted into a sewing room.

Although living in a house without a space dedicated to needlework had been a constant challenge, and had undoubtedly put a great strain on our marriage, in the end we decided to disregard his advice and keep the downstairs bathroom, although in deference to his suggestion it is now referred to as “the sewing room.” After much debate we decided  that it would be a good idea to hold onto the stair lift as well, since it’s a good model and I’m sure that one of us will need to make use of it sooner or later.

After spending many years sharing a garden with three other properties, I have adjusted well to the novelty of having a large, open space all to myself.  At the far end, there is a row of four, very tall cedar trees. When we first arrived there were five. The one that we lost was shedding its branches in high winds and turned out to have weak roots. We had it removed before it could fall and crush our neighbour’s greenhouse. 

Every year a tree surgeon - a young chap called Vincent – comes around and gives the surviving quartet a health check and a bit of a prune. His professional opinion is that they are weak specimens and will eventually go the same way as their fallen sibling. He calls them Victory Cedars - Four of many thousand that were planted in England to commemorate the end of the Second World War. The seeds were apparently given away by one of the national newspapers. People dutifully planted them in their gardens, or in public spaces, often with great ceremony.

I first met Vincent a few hours after we moved in. I opened the front door just as he was attempting to put a leaflet, advertising his services, through the letterbox. The back garden had been neglected and was in a bit of state. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind having a look at the trees. He said he was happy to do it and returned the following day.

At the time Vincent was just starting out in the trade and was using a second-hand van to move his gear around. Despite his best efforts to remove the transfers promoting the business of the vehicle’s previous owners, you could still discern the outline of the words “The pie man,” along with an accompanying phone number, on both side panels.

He was very rough and ready in his approach to his work. His method of reaching the upper branches of the cedars, which were a good 15-20 feet off the ground, involved shimmying up thick, hairy ropes, that were a cross between jungle vines and giant dreadlocks. They were disturbingly warm to the touch, as if alive. Small, naturally-formed pockets appeared intermittently along their length. He would jam the various tools of his trade into these tiny openings.

“They are really quite extraordinary things,” I remarked, the first time I laid eyes on them.

“I got them in Romania. They’re made by birds...They’re incredibly strong.”

To emphasise his last point he reached out to and gave one of the dangling ropes a firm downward tug.

We didn’t know each other very well then, and I assumed that he was pulling my leg. Later that day I did a search online and discovered that, just as he claimed, the ropes had indeed been woven by a small relative of the House Sparrow called the Puțină Frânghie Filtru (the Little Rope Maker).

They are tiny, wren-sized birds with unremarkable brown and cream plumage and very short tail feathers. Their erratic, bobbing flight paths imitates the movement of a small stone skimming across water. Like Swallows they breed communally. Their nesting colonies take the form of thick ropes that are sometimes several hundred feet in length. These are woven over many centuries and passed down through the generations. They were once a common sight in Eastern Europe hanging down cliff faces and the walls of old buildings. The activity of bacteria within the ropes causes them to generate heat and act as incubators for the clutches of eggs, which are laid in small pockets formed in the weave.

During the winter the birds migrate to parts of southern Africa. In their absence their nests are co-opted by climbers, although in many countries there are strict laws governing when they can be used recreationally, so as not to disrupt breeding. In the past it was common to see them  employed as bell pulls in Romanian churches, although that practice is now outlawed.  

Incredibly, an examination of the materials used in one of these cords found well-preserved strands of human hair, over 500 years old. Using DNA profiling, scientists were able to link this hair, along with other less venerable follicle samples, to several generations of a family who lived on a farm nearby. During their lifetime each person shed hair that was taken by the birds and woven into this common thread, tying the family to the area and binding its individual members together down through the centuries.

When Vincent returned the following year he had ditched his Romanian ropes in favour of professional-looking climbing gear. I went out with a mug of tea and some biscuits, to find him suspended in a harness ten feet in the air.

“What happened to your old ropes?” I called out, as I approached across the dewy lawn. The steaming tea sloshing against the steeply angled sides of the mug.

He explained that somebody had purchased them from him on EBay for £3000.

“They’re a protected habitats now, aren’t they. You can’t take them from the wild like you used to. That’s pushed up the market value. I couldn’t turn down money like that.”

He lowered himself to the ground and took the mug of tea from me.

“My wife used to refer to you as Tarzan.”

“To be honest, they looked good, but they were bit of an affectation.”

 *

By Mark Sadler.

The trembling pink Atlantic

From 1973 to 1981 I worked for Tansy Cruise Liners, a family-owned company founded in Atlantic City by a retired US Admiral.

For most of this time I was employed as Chief Steward on ‘The Baby Sienna’ – the smallest ship in the Tansy fleet. It seldom ventured far from port and was mostly used  for short jaunts up and down the east coast.

In 1983, Jason and Andrew Tansy sold the company to the Meekos Shipping Group. Their first act as new owners was to sail the entire fleet in convoy around Cape Horn, and then back up along the west coast  to San Francisco. Here, all the ships underwent an expensive program of modernisation and refurbishment that, in my opinion, robbed them of a lot of their charm.

Not long after this, The Sienna B (as she was known to her crew) gained an unwanted notoriety that alienated many of Meekos’s more conservative shareholders. The company had been attempting to bolster revenues, while at the same time keeping down costs, by leasing their vessels to third parties. The Sienna B was rented, quite openly, by a consortium of seven porn studios who went on to use its dining hall/ballroom as the venue for a 200 person gangbang, with many smaller productions taking place in other areas of the ship. All in all, over a period of three days, 49 films were made. The end result was a massive spike in nautical-themed, hardcore pornography.

Although I was well aware of the gangbang’s existence, I only laid eyes on this cinematic masterpiece on my 60th birthday, when a DVD transfer of the movie was among my gifts. That evening I settled down to watch it with a small group that consisted of my wife and some of our oldest and closest friends. John and Ann had clearly never watched pornography in their lives and took some convincing that it was perfectly legal, and that a SWAT team wasn’t about to come battering their way in through the front door at any moment.

The first thing that struck me was how bad the picture quality was. Digital TV has really spoiled us. After I got over that, I was amazed by how quaint it all seemed. I mean, people screw each other pretty much the same way they always have, but there was something about the dated  hairstyles and the abundant, untamed pubic hair that made me feel nostalgic for the early 80s, as if I was watching some sepia film footage dredged up from the National Archives.  

I can say with 100% certainty that, when I worked on The Sienna B, nobody was taken roughly from behind over the Captain’s table by a man wearing nothing but an ecstatic grimace and a tri-cornered hat.

During my stewardship, one of our most popular outings was the romantic New York Valentines Day Cruise (which actually took place over two days, with the option to extend the trip over a week). One of Jason Tansy’s old friends from MIT  had developed a bioluminescent algae that glowed a brilliant fluorescent pink. We used to store several tonnes of it in the front and rear ballast tanks of the ship. After the candlelit dinner we would usher all the couples out onto the deck and then jettison the algae into the Atlantic where it would form a dazzling pink halo around the ship. From my observation post it was a beautiful sight. In the foreground there would be the silhouettes of men going down on one knee to propose, while other couples stood holding hands or with their arms around each other. It sounds schmaltzy but the spectacle never failed to bring a lump to my throat.

Standing apart from the others would be the solitary figure of Ms Kilshaw who attended every one of our February 14^th cruises alone and never talked to anyone.

We did that for three years. During this time the only complaints we received were from a handful of residents along the eastern seaboard where some of this algae had washed up in slicks. Because it glowed they assumed that it was radioactive or toxic, when in fact it was completely harmless to humans and marine wildlife.

On the fourth year we did it, we inadvertently disrupted a clandestine naval exercise that was taking place nearby. It turns out that the electric charge generated by the algae was causing a stream of ions to surge upwards from the ocean bed, disrupting the delicate instruments on a nearby warship.

The following day a man from the Pentagon visited the Tansy brothers in their office and told them:

“Please never do this again.”

The following year we tired to recreate the algae effect using spotlights, but it never worked as well.

~ backwards7.

A nation of twats

Amanda is worried that she might be a twat.

“Oh no darling, you couldn’t possibly be,” says Sara, as she places a reassuring hand on Amanda’s knee.

Jocasta and I exchange a knowing glance across the table. In private we have discussed how Sara is by far the biggest twat we have ever encountered in our lives. In the index of twats she is right up there with Magneto from the X-Men, or Darth Vader. She also figures prominently in The Eye-Spy Book of Wanker Drivers, that I compulsively fill-in during my cycle commute to work, as I ride no-handed through red traffic lights.

The reason for Amanda’s most-recent episode of self-doubt lies in her unbridled enthusiasm for a performance she witnessed at an Islington folk club the previous evening. A young man (whose antique clothing, flat cap and neatly-trimmed moustache were redolent of someone who had travelled forward in time from the year 1914, possibly to avoid being conscripted into the armed forces) had attempted to pass off the inane z-list nursery rhyme – Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son  as an authentic a capella folk song, which he had re-titled: “Oh Tom [sung: “Torm”] he were [sung: “wore”] the Pipeman’s Son, and which he performed in a fake, over-enunciated Lancastrian accent.

“I was down the front clapping along and applauding like a mental patient...” says Amanda, who is clearly distressed and appalled by her behaviour.

“...That song is nursery school prattle and I know it. If Jeremy ever had the bare-faced nerve to come home from his playgroup singing that, I would instruct him to go to his room at once and to be quite, as mummy has a headache and needs to lie down for a while.

“The worse thing of all is the strained affectation. A year from now that boy will be over his folk music phase. The flat cap and the moustache will be gone. He’ll be on Dragons Den being scowled at by Duncan Bannatyne, while trying to raise money to fund a new app, designed by him and his twattish female business partner, who he’ll end up shagging and disastrously undermining what passes for their working relationship.” 

As ever, it is level-headed Giles who intervenes and re-establishes equilibrium: He brings us all back down to earth with his observation that the tendrils of twattery have insidiously wormed their way into every aspect of modern living, to such an extent that it is now impossible not to be a twat.

“We are a nation, if not a species, of twats,” he says, summarising his argument in the distinct baritone that he has unsuccessfully employed in auditions for roles as diverse as ‘The voice-over part in a Toilet Duck commercial’ and ‘The voice-over part in a Flash Power Bathroom Spray commercial.’  

The following week I find myself at the Twat Nation club night in Shoreditch, chopping out a line of the latest legal high (called ‘Chair,’ because it makes you feel like a chair) on one of the mirrors that have been thoughtfully embedded into the counter by the sink. Peering down into the reflective surface  I see the face of a twat staring back at me.

Father Donald & the Unicorn

Father Donald was obsessed with unicorns. I was never able to uncover the reasons behind  his morbid preoccupation. Like many obsessions, I imagine that it can be traced back to some traumatic event that must have occurred during his childhood.   

“The unicorn is ruled by lust,” was a mantra that he repeated ritually and with such florid drama that it was to became his personal sacrament. Spittle would bubble up at the corners of his mouth, as if his admiration and celibate envy of the unicorn was permeating through his veneer of disapproval, like a polluted underground spring. 

One day I couldn’t take it any more.

“Father Donald!” I exclaimed “There are no fucking unicorns! The last one died at London Zoo in 1933! It was given a state funeral and is buried not five miles from where we presently stand, in the Nave at Westminster Abbey!”

It was this outburst that saw me moved from St Giles, in the capital, to the quiet rural parish of Marshbottom where (I have unofficially been informed) I am to see out my days as a priest.   

Father Donald was excommunicated two years later, after he was discovered having sex with an antique bible that dated back to the mid 1500s. I did not ask which particular book he had chosen to penetrate. Whatever one’s opinions are of his sexual deviancy, I remember him as a gentlemen, and a gentlemen never tells.

The use of live Hip Hop performances as a tool in the early diagnosis of strokes

Enclosed below is the abstract of a study that I hope to submit for funding and peer review, with an eye towards publication in a reputable medical journal. Any criticism that you feel may improve the scope or efficacy of this research will be gratefully received. Meaningful suggestions and contributions will be fully credited in the final work.

Yours in science

backwards7

The use of live Hip Hop performances as a tool in the early diagnosis of strokes 

Author affiliations 

The second album by Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back - blew my teenage mind, although its impact has been diluted by subsequent lesser works,  released mainly during the mid-late 1990s/early 2000s. 

I think that I once saw Wyclef Jean from The Fugees out and about in London , but I can’t be sure whether it was actually him, or somebody who looked a bit like him.

Abstract

Objective: To determine whether live Hip Hop performances can play a role in the early detection of strokes.

Hip Hop and its derivations have come to dominate contemporary popular music. The genre’s emphasis on tight rhymes coming at you hard from the mic, courtesy of its most accomplished MCs, make it a reliable diagnostic tool. It is largely thanks to groundbreaking research by Flavor Flav, and his choice of an analogue clock as over-sized medallion, that we can confidently state, with a high degree of accuracy, what the time is at any given moment.  

In recent years a common feature of the live Hip Hop performance has been the incitement to “Throw your hands in the air and wave ‘em around like you just don’t care.” 

The primary aim of this ritual is to generate a party vibe. Since the inability of a subject to raise their hands above their head is also a dependable indicator of a stroke in progress, it seems likely that this well-established staple of Hip Hop performance might play a key role in the early diagnosis of strokes, and therefore hasten the speed with which medical treatment can be administered. 

Design: Meta-analysis of stroke-related symptoms among Hip Hop audiences. Control groups composed of audiences of bands such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, where open displays of enjoyment of the music, beyond a subtle nodding of the head, are frowned upon, and the arms of the audience typically remain folded throughout the performance.   

Data sources: Party Hip Hop playlists or compilations. Basically anything with phat beats on it. Dubstep and any satellite genre that sounds like Techno leaking through the wall of an adjoining residence while, outside, rain falls on the plastic roof of a bus shelter, will be discounted as unsuitable, due to the unlikelihood of such music inspiring much care-free hand-waving. 

Review methods: Randomised trials correlating a live Hip Hop audience’s participation in hand-waving rituals with incidences of strokes diagnosed at said performances. 

Great care must be taken to exclude other factors that might repress or prevent hand-waving. On a basic level these include an unwillingness to join in due to shyness, an uncooperative personality, or known conditions such as autism or depression. 

The age of participants must also be taken into account. For attendees past the age of about 35, making any kind of abandoned spontaneous movement without warming-up first is inadvisable. Even allowing for a well-implemented pre-exercise regime, violently throwing your limbs in any direction is, in general, a very bad idea for anyone who is no longer in the flower of their youth. 

When reviewing elderly audience members, a slow and deliberate raising of a subject’s hands into the air, in preference over a sudden jerking movement that might conceivably throw their back out, may indicate a prudent sense of caution, as opposed to the gradual onset of a stroke.  

   

Another factor, again related to old age, that might prevent feckless hand-waving, is that accrued knowledge and experience can make it harder not to care about things. 

We must of course recognize that a responsible, fully-licensed and accredited MC will request that the audience wave their hands around “Like you just don’t care.” He or she is not for one moment suggesting that they should cease caring; only that they convey the general impression that, at this singular point in time, the fly rhymes coming from the mic have ushered them into a communal state of euphoria, in which their everyday concerns are of secondary importance to the performance currently unfolding on the stage.

Even so, pretending that you “just don’t care” can present a major challenge for the middle-aged, when in the back of their minds linger nagging doubts about raising children in a world where the boiler keeps going out and the price of apples on the open market consistently gallops ahead of inflation. 

It should also be noted that, in a club environment, other symptoms synonymous with the onset of a stroke, such as slurred speech, may be attributable to intoxication.   

Possible outcomes: New avenues of research. Possible endorsements by Doctor Dre and sponsorship deals from trainer manufacturers such as Nike and Adidas. Greater survival and recovery from strokes among fans of Hip Hop.