Heavens to Murgatroyd! (Who was Murgatroyd? Looking it up on Wikipedia doesn't count.) As I was pressing the "Publish Post" button on the "The Most Boring Post In The World" for today, Friday 27 October 2006, I heard an ENORMOUS explosion and a shout.
It sounded as if my French windows had exploded. I rushed to the garden and what did I see? A plume of smoke wafting over the wall from a neighbour's garden (the garden in which grows without check the Malevolent Cat-Killing Apple Tree), and a smouldering firework on the pile of debris currently obscuring my own extensive acreage.
Eek! Whatever next? I hardly dare move. That Guy Fawkes* fella has A LOT to answer for.
(Hot 5th November News: In Lewes they burn Guy Fawkes, The Pope, and another political figure. Last year it was the Rt Hon Charles Clarke MP. Fingers crossed it's Oliver Letwyn this year. The man has the smuggest face I have ever seen in my life.)
*For Foreign Readers: Guy Fawkes (aka Guido Fawkes, b. York, April 13, 1570), took it upon himself to try and blow up King James 1 (who was extremely flatulent, dribbled a lot and had a very ugly wife), and both Houses of Parliament on 5th November 1605. (Fawkes was a Catholic. Henry VIII made England Protestant so he could get divorced a couple of times and clock up the wives. Then Edward VI made us Definitely Protestant. He died and Bloody Mary, who was a fucking lunatic, took over. She was Catholic and burnt a lot of people on stakes. Then she pegged it and Elizabeth I took over, made us Protestant again, and walked on Sir Walter Raleigh's cloak a bit whilst eating potatoes and smoking a small clay pipe containing the tobacco he introduced to Britain. Anyway, the upshot of all this hoo-ha is that the Catholics were a bit pissed off - which is fair enough, all things considered.)
In memory of this splendid attempt (known as The Gunpowder Plot), every year we have fireworks and that and burn an effigy of Fawkes, or some other political figure. Pesky kids take their rubbish Guy (usually made out of their mother's enormous knickers, a balloon and carrot), and sit on street corners going "Penny for the Guy?". If you do not give them at least five pounds, they steal your mobile phone. The irony is that Fawkes was Detected before the gunpowder actually went off, so why we actually blow up gunpowder and that on 5th November I will never know.
NB: I remembered all of this out of my head. For this I have to thank Mrs Stanier my history teacher who - if I remember rightly - had a crush on Conrad Russell and drove a Renault 4.
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11 comments:
why aren't you a historian?
really. it all makes sense to me now. move over simon schama, historian-monkey is here, and she surely dresses better than you, you twonk.
sorry. simon schama irritates me intensely. he's not your dad, is he?
SS is not my Dad thank the Lord, otherwise I'd look like him innit. I know NO history at all apart from the bits that Mrs Stanier taught me. Apparently one of the Hapsburgs (sp?) used to lie in his bed and get his personal guard to parade through his bedroom wearing nothing but their enormous Prussian helmets with great big spikes on. And we all know how Catherine the Great died. (Allegedly.)
Bollocks. Apparently Catherine the Great had a heart attack in the bath at the age of 67. Shame. I liked the story about the stallion.
good ol' wikipedia. :)
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story - the stallion it is !
So if Guido Day is Nov 5th, why is your garden exploding today ? Is your neighbor rehearsing his own gunpowder recipe ?
I used to do that as a kid, mind you. Sugar + saltpeter = loverly colourful flames in the alley + breathless escapes from befuddled cops.
Lucretia, do you know I am so SAD. I got ALL of the Guy Fawkes stuff out of my head. The minute I use Wikipedia all my Catherine the Great stories are destroyed. I am very unhappy. I daren't look up James I. If I find out he didn't drool, I will kill myself.
J-Boy - God knows. I daren't ask. (Not that I could. The wall is 20ft high, and I am 5ft 8 and can't jump much.) But I am set to thinking by your comment: with that kind of chemistry mastered at such an early age, perhaps you could consider 'Scientist' as one of your career options? Just a thought.
Of course, you broke the delightful Mrs Stanier as a teacher, so she became a local councillor instead - and a very good one at that - so thanks.
Ijust suffered through a rather dull presentation by a Dr. David Starkey on PBS about William the Conqueror..Your version of history is far less boring and much easier to red. Hmm at least Catherine the Great died nicely bathed..
A Wikipedia entry is only as accurate as the accurateness of the person who wrote it, and sometimes that is not very accurate at all. I'm trying to remember the one I came across, on a subject I know a bit about (it might have been on morris-dancing), and the Wikipedia entry was rubbish.
Anyhow. I loved your 1066 and all that round-up of the Tudors. Our history teacher was a young woman with wavy red hair and a crush on the Latin teacher (who walked on tip-toes because he had short Achilles tendons); he never recovered his credibility after some old love-letters from him to someone else were found in a Latin book he lent to one of my fellow pupils. Love-letters written but not sent, of course, and probably just as well because in them it sounded as if he thought himself intellectually superior to the beloved object.
That was at an independent girls' boarding school - can you tell? Eccentricity was to all intents and purposes compulsory, in both teachers and pupils. I ought to write a book.
Scientist, moi ? You must be kidding. I have no trust in these lab-coated charlatans. I'm doing perfectly fine with my energy crystals, long-distance reiki healing and nightly chamomile enemas.
MM - I LOVE her.
Martina, wasn't EastEnders on?
Indigo - this story is Genius.
J-Boy - can you talk to the animals?
Je M'Exprime, bonjour et welcome. Do I know you? Merci pour vos kind words. I agree about and that, I just can't help it, and that. Where is your blog?
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