Peasants, pigs and astronauts

I like Wikipedia. Once you accept that it’s not a remotely reliable source to use for essay citations, you can have a lot of fun with it. And 80%, maybe 90% of what is on there is probably verifiable fact. But it’s the opportunity it affords for creative vandalism that really warms the soul. The handful of edits I have personally made to Wikipedia pages have been wholly at the service of truth, but sometimes I wonder what I might achieve if I just let my imagination run free.

The first time I noticed vandalism on Wikipedia was on a visit a few years ago to the Richard Nixon page, where I observed with some amusement that the caption accompanying his photo read ‘President Fuckhead Nixon’. Little did I think at the time that a minor alteration like this could be magnified several times over.

The field of light entertainment appears to be a popular target for vandals, and the more mundane the subject of the entry the better. At the time of writing, the entry for Clive Dunn suggests the beloved comic actor nearly died in infancy during an operation to remove a third nipple. I offer my wholehearted apologies to Dunn if this is a fact, but judicious googling suggests that it is not. A small detail like this can snowball into something big. In 2007 a number of national newspapers stated in obituaries that Ronnie Hazlehurst, the master of the comedy theme tune, had composed S Club 7′s abysmal but catchy 2000 hit single ‘Reach’. They later issued retractions.

This is authentic Hazlehurst.

Of all the vandalised Wikipedia entries for celebrities, though, John Virgo occupies my top spot. Virgo is a snooker player turned commentator. How to distil the essence of the man? This is from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22:

Even among men lacking distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed with how unimpressive he was.

I have a curious and inexplicable affection for Virgo, but it’s hard to deny that he possesses the capability of making Steve Davis look like Socrates. Virgo used to specialise in trick shots and ‘hilarious’ impressions of other players, and since entering the commentary box he has added the ‘humorous’ catchphrase to his quiver. ‘Where’s the cue ball going? WHERE’S THE CUE BALL GOING?’ he will cry whenever it moves within six inches of a pocket.

This edit of his Wikipedia entry, dating from around the time of this year’s World Championship, contains a lengthy section, since excised entirely, devoted to Virgo’s catchphrases, which superbly combines the accurate, the false but credible, and occasionally the outrageous and/or sexually suggestive. The attention to detail more than anything is what impresses me. A selection:

“It’s all about the in-play.”

“That wiped its feet.” (when a ball rattles in the jaws, before going in)

“That’s one of his five-a-day.” (when someone pots the green)

“Is he having a laugh? Are you having a laugh?” (when Joe Swail misses an easy yellow)

“Peasants, pigs and astronauts!” (when the cue ball splits the pack of reds after hitting the blue)

“Well, roger me sideways and call me Mr. Bent-Back Tallywhacker.” (When a player goes in off the blue)

“Pot as many balls as you can.” (when Michaela Tabb enters the arena)

“There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”

Even the user who took it upon himself to remove the vandalism stated his admiration for the perpetrator at the time.

But the most audacious vandalism I have come across recently concerns the entry for Frome (pop. 30,000 approx.), the Somerset market town where I grew up (which, in spite of the claims of the article, has never been referred to by anyone as “Europe’s new funky-town” or “the good-time capital of England”).

The edited page begins unassumingly, with a skim-read revealing no glaring inaccuracies. I have no idea, for instance, whether “The predominant wind direction is from the south west” or not, but it sounds as likely as not. Gradually, the lies begin to creep in. The paragraph in which things start to go off track may be this one:

The older parts of Frome – for example, around Sheppard’s Barton and Catherine Hill – are picturesque, containing an outstanding collection of late 17th and 18th century small houses. The Trinity area, which was built in the latter half of the 17th century and first half of the 18th century, is a fine (and rare) example of early industrial housing. Over 300 houses were built between 1660 and 1756 in a very unusual early example of a planned grid-pattern. Town landmarks include the Frome Archaeological Museum, exhibiting the Gold of Somerset, the Roman Baths, the Park Museum, the Naval Museum in the Villa Assareto displaying the museum ship Drazki torpedo boat, the Museum of Ethnography in an Elizabethen-period [sic] compound featuring the life of local urban dwellers, fisherfolk, and peasants in the late 19th and early 20th century.

From this point onwards the article amalgamates information about Frome with the entry for the Bulgarian Black Sea resort of Varna, incorporating some original flights of fancy. Perhaps the best part of all is this:

Two old mosques (one is open) have survived since Victorian times, when there were 18 of them in town, as have two once stately but now dilapidated synagogues, a Sephardic and an Ashkenazic one, the latter in Gothic style (it is undergoing restoration). A new mosque was recently added in the southern Asparuhovo district serving the adjacent Muslim Roma neighborhood.

I can’t begin to catalogue the inaccuracies contained in the paragraph above. This intrusion of the exotic into rural Somerset is ingenious. There is such an embarrassment of riches elsewhere that I can’t reasonably quote everything I would like to. “The National Revival Alley is decorated with bronze monuments to prominent locals and the Cosmonauts’ Alley contains trees planted by Yuri Gagarin and other French and Italian cosmonauts … Like other Somerset towns, Frome has its share of stray dogs, for the most part calm and friendly, flashing orange clips on the ears showing they have been castrated and vaccinated.” It’s worth a browse. The inclusion of pictures from the article on Varna is an inspired touch. There is no “Art Nouveau mansion on Prince Boris I Boulevard” in Frome.

The dome of Frome Cathedral

There is a website where the formulation of fictitious encyclopaedia entries is encouraged. It is called Uncyclopedia and is a haven for the pathologically mendacious. Here you can learn, for instance, that Richard Littlejohn “donated half of the royalties from sales of his book To Hell In A Handcart to the Islamist terrorist group Hezbollah. This enabled Hezbollah to buy an extra pencil. However, it was a cheap pencil and the lead snapped in half.” (And that is the last time Littlejohn will ever be mentioned on these pages by me. You have my word of honour.) A lot of this is impressive in its way, but reading nothing other than what Stephen Fry might call a tissue of farragoes or a catalogue of litanies can be tiresome. It’s more fun, I think, to find that a piece which is generally accurate – moreover, meant to be accurate – contains a handful of cheeky falsehoods.

Writing in books

I wrote recently of the joys of finding annotations in books. It’s a cardinal sin to write in a library book, of course, though I do enjoy reading what other people have written in them. But it isn’t just annotations that are exciting, it’s also dedications and inscriptions.

The idea of writing one’s name inside the front cover of books was one I became aware of quite early on. There must have been a small number of books I read as a little boy that had formerly been treasured possessions of my mother in her girlhood. I don’t think I made the connection that name signifies property until later on, though. When I was 6, my teacher read a book to my class that I loved, The Chimney Witches by Victoria Whitehead. After a small amount of petitioning I was given my own copy, inside the cover of which I proceeded to write my teacher’s name in felt-tip, so that it would resemble her copy. She didn’t write as messily as I did, though, and only wrote her name once rather than multiple times.

As a child I compensated for not having neat, adult handwriting by contriving an intentionally messy signature, which is present in most of my Roald Dahl books. If a book was particularly special – a large book or a hardback – and I wanted to write my name inside it, I took precautions to write neatly. For Christmas in 1990 my paternal grandparents gave me a marvellously enlightening and informative encyclopaedia – overinformative, they might have said, if they had looked at the section at the back on the human body containing graphic colour illustrations of the rogering process. I wrote my name inside, along with the date and occasion, though my inscription was spoiled rather by smudges. This will always be one of the perils of being left-handed. When I wrote my name inside books as a teenager, I would write it in the top left-hand corner of the inside cover, rather than on the first recto page, in order to avoid creasing the cover.

Half of the second-hand books I buy have people’s names inside them, but a personal dedication is a special thing that I find it doubly difficult to resist. Once it contains a personal message, a book becomes an artefact. When I was 13 I went to see John Hegley at the Traverse during the Edinburgh Festival, and queued up to have my copy of Glad to Wear Glasses signed by him. He misheard my name and was halfway through ‘Darren’ before I had a chance to correct him. He disguised his mistake with the greatest of ease.

An expected annotation

But somehow the mystery of messages by people one doesn’t know has a power of its own. The 2001 Match annual came out at about the time I decided I was too old to keep reading the magazine, but I couldn’t resist buying a copy of it from a Cambridge charity shop about three years ago after I opened it and saw, alongside a passport photo of a sweet-looking girl, the message:

To Tom
You were my first friend in
Bluntisham.
I will miss you.
I hope someone nice moves
into my house for you to play
with.
Best wishes
from
Lauren

I suppose Tom and Lauren are now doing their A levels, or at university somewhere or other.

Our library copy of Christopher Headington’s biography of Peter Pears bears the inscription:

Dear Jonathan
This is your coming down,
out, and hopefully up present.
Read it, beware + be happy.
Michael
Aug 1992

I wonder what circumstances led this book away from its owner and into an academic library. It can be heartbreaking to think of the people who have fallen away somewhere, got lost in history. But better here than in a charity shop, I thought when I discovered it.

It occasionally happens that one finds a book from many years ago bearing the author’s signature, or even the signature of other famous people. I am informed that on seeing the manuscript of Austen’s Sanditon one of our students began jumping up and down. What happened to me this week was less common. I bought in a library book sale a copy of The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, and didn’t realise until I got home that there were sparing pencil annotations throughout. On closer inspection the handwriting had a familiar, distinctive quality, and the style of the comments left me in little doubt that this was a book annotated personally by composer and academic Robin Holloway. The annotations give an indication not only of the man’s opinions but also of his amiably arch sense of humour: “a flat-footed pedestrian”, “this man’s an idiot”, “feeble anodyne tosh”, and so on.

An unexpected annotation

Social historian Joe Moran wrote a customarily interesting piece on ebooks recently. I’m not someone who is particularly violently opposed to the idea of digital books. I acknowledge, for instance, that they possess convenient attributes that paper books don’t, like instant searchability and economy of storage, though I don’t feel the slightest inclination to buy a Kindle or any such contraption for myself. It’s plainly obvious, though, that in terms of personality the paper book and the ebook are poles apart. How utterly impersonal the Kindle is. Nothing chronicled in this post above would exist if our books were all in electronic form.

Stephen Fry released his latest book last month in multiple formats – hardback, audiobook, ebook, iPhone app. I wondered before going to meet him and have my book signed what he would do if it were on an iPad. Sign the back, I suppose. But who cares about the back of a book when all that matters is what’s inside?

Memory triggers

While on holiday a month and a bit ago, I came across a mysterious reminder on my phone. It had been set for 15th November and read simply ‘Donovan’. Had I set this reminder myself? I must have done, though I had no memory of it. And what on earth did it mean?

I turned the matter over in my head. I could approach this problem from two different directions: the word, Donovan, and the date, 15th November.

What does Donovan mean to me? Jason Donovan, of course. I was quite a fan of his when I was about six years old. And his father Terence, also in the cast of Neighbours when I used to watch it in the mid-’90s. Also Donovan, the singer-songwriter from the 1960s, of whom I know nothing (and, pace hippies, in whom I have approximately no interest whatsoever) and whom I probably confuse with Lonnie Donegan as often as not. And I have known of people called Donovan in real life, though not known them personally.

What about 15th November? Well, it’s no less attractive a date than many others. It is the birthday of mercurial Uruguayan midfielder Gustavo Poyet, currently manager of Brighton and, among South American players, the Premier League’s all-time joint top goalscorer – until, that is, Carlos Tévez overtakes him, which will surely happen before the month is out, very possibly away at Blackpool on 17th October. Watch the video below to see him put a couple past Man Utd legend Massimo Taibi. But apart from this spectacularly useless knowledge, I can’t claim the date holds any special meaning for me.

Nothing in these paltry associations, then, suggested any connection between the two known facts. I had frankly abandoned hope of deciphering the meaning of the word, but decided as a hopeless last resort to ask friends and relations for suggestions via Facebook. As I began to type the request into the status update box, the answer magically presented itself to me. Donovan is the surname of my piano tuner, and I need to call him in mid-November so I can book a time to have the piano tuned before Christmas.

Needs tuning before the little red tree goes up this year

I can’t work out which is greater: the complacency of my assumption that I would automatically work out what ‘Donovan’ meant if I forgot, or the shame of forgetting my piano tuner’s name. Or the proof this whole story provides of my irredeemable middle-classness. It’s funny, though, regardless of all this baggage, to contemplate how, after seemingly endless and exhausting efforts to remember a piece of information, the slightest mental process brings it suddenly into focus.

This instantaneous unlocking of information has, like everything I write, been better expressed elsewhere. This passage from the start of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley is one of presumably many such expressions. The narrator, now middle-aged, has discovered a diary that is to awaken a trauma that has been suppressed since his boyhood:

I did not want to touch it and told myself that this was because it challenged my memory; I was proud of my memory and disliked having it prompted. So I sat staring at the diary, as at a blank space in a crossword puzzle. Still no light came, and suddenly I took the combination lock and began to finger it, for I remembered how, at school, I could always open it by the sense of touch when someone else had set the combination. It was one of my show-pieces and, when I first mastered it, drew some applause, for I declared that to do it I had to put myself into a trance; and this was not quite a lie, for I did deliberately empty my mind and let my fingers work without direction. To heighten the effect, however, I would close my eyes and sway gently to and fro, until the effort of keeping my consciousness at a low ebb almost exhausted me; and this I found myself instinctively doing now, as to an audience. After a timeless interval I heard the tiny click and felt the sides of the lock relax and draw apart; and at the same moment, as if by some sympathetic loosening in my mind, the secret of the diary flashed upon me.