Zeppelin Heights

THE COLD AIR tightened my face as I stepped out onto the flight pad. I popped up the collar of my bomber jacket and tugged at the edges of my leather gloves. The air fogged up in front of me as I hurried the kids into the cockpit of the blimp and then followed them in, and struggled to seal the hatch tight.

I swore at the memory of Abe Feldman’s name, that bloody mechanic had promised to fix the seal of my hatch for six months before he died. Blimp accident. Fifteen people I know have died in various blimp accidents over the last two years but I’ll be damned if those fascists in Downing Street are going to ban the nation’s favourite mode of transport.

I checked the mirrors to see if the wife had untied the blimp from the side of the house and we were off, the blimp slowly thundered off down the street towards the school. Mrs Horowitz waved as she came along in the opposite direction in her oversized AirCad. I waved back, making a mock salute against my flight cap, much in the same way I have for the last fifteen years.

I turned in my seat and separated the kids who were fighting over a slinky or Rubick’s cube or something but before I could sort the problem there was a terrible grinding and shattering as I realised I had mounted Joe Grub’s roof. Insurance will pay for that, of course. As I looked out over the high-highway tens of blimps drifted across my field of vision and the pink sky. An explosion drew my attention away from the scene, I check my mirror to see that Mrs Horowitz’s blimp had gone up as she’d tried to park it in that eyesore of a garage her son had put up last July. I’d tried to get a petition going to make her take it down.

Sweets for my sweet tooth

THE YEAR BEGINS anew. The ‘10 becomes ‘11. Noughties turn into – what, teenies? Our better halves proclaim diets for all and slap a prohibition on the Mr Porky’s even as we’re bitterly sucking the last few orange creams. As she spends most of her spare time not conducting an affair but training in the gym, presumably for an affair, it is reasonable to assume that the diet is a hint in my direction.

Thereafter, as I sift through shopping bags turfing aside Alpro yoghurts and bulgur wheat in search of Msr. Kipling’s finest, I’m want to ponder the subject of addiction. We all know it’s a powerful thing, but it’s a real kicker when the fix you need no longer exists.

It’s a sure sign of age when the sweets you enjoyed as a child/adolescent/student are no longer in production. Where are the Golden Cups? the Bursting Bugs? the fabled Winner Tacos? Come on, old man Rowntree, cut me some slack here. Another sign of age is swearing that new and old sweets that are available don’t taste ‘like they used to’. Never, I’m quite sure, has anyone uttering these words considered that their tastes might have changed, both through the physical degradation of the taste buds and the diminishing psychological drive to devour half a Milka – a large Milka – before dinner.

But that’s addiction for you; you have to keep at least trying the sweets or how will you know what they don’t taste like anymore? Some of us go to extreme lengths to indulge a waning sweet tooth: some of us actually import all kinds of things from the other side of the Atlantic ocean just to have a bowl of Fruit Loops and a significant other who can tell her friends that we refuse to grow up.

Showdown at the Library of Babel, part II

Showdown at the Library of Babel, part I

About two weeks prior to Christmas I ordered a selection of books from everyone’s – well, mine, at least - favourite online book emporium, each costing no more than a penny plus the exorbitant p&p. I was fully aware that ice, snow and Christmas cripple the entire infrastructure of this country, especially our doughty postal workers; so I thought it might take over a week to receive them. Out of the four books purchased two came within about a week, of the other two, both bought from the same seller (but packaged separately…), one arrived on the doormat in the last days before Christmas but the last one I received yesterday. The fourth of January.

Now, I wasn’t particularly miffed about the late delivery but on closer inspection of the received package it had been crudely folded and bound up with brown tape on one side – I, initially, assumed to make it more ‘postable’ – and after removal of this tape I discovered that the package's corrugated seal had been broken. Fine, I thought, so someone’s had a go at it and discovered the contents weren’t their bag. Fair enough.

Only then I realised that the back cover and the last three pages had been torn vertically in half and discarded. I shook the packet. Not in there. I sat staring at this conundrum for a good few moments. The seller had listed it as being in ‘very good’ condition. They confirmed for me that before dispatch it was indeed intact. I was perplexed. Had someone really been so offended by The Alan Coren Omnibus that they had shredded the last few pages (a parody of The Great Gatsby no less) in order to make an anti-feuilletonistic statement and bunged it into the post again? Perhaps with a kind of ‘I’ll show this doubled-barrelled twit satire!’ sentiment?

I relayed this story to my good friend Prof. Edmund Prygge the other day; his only reaction was to shake his head, as he ground up a common blue butterfly into chocolate snuff, and say, ‘Alan Coren, eh? Well, if you will play with fire...’ I idly pushed some not-quite-stale Christmas cake around my plate.

Four reforming finches...

AMONGST THE RUINS of the frozen and desiccated herb garden this morning I spied four familiar goldfinches with an obvious penchant for haute cuisine pecking merrily about. This is of course the so-called ‘gang of four’, as the tabloid press has dubbed them. Four finches that, in these times of austerity, have not opted to fly south to Africa for the winter, like those preening birds of paradise, but have decided to stay and tough it out with the proletariat tits and sparrows.

Admirable behaviour like this is rarely seen in the bird world; from the notorious underhanded behaviour of those liberal cuckoos to the lumbering greed of the more conservative waddling fowl – all of these and many other feathery followers flock to the balmy post-equatorial climbs – only to return when the good times are great the following spring. Is there, I wonder, a move to place sanctions upon deserting/returning birds; seed-exiles, if you will; should we, the hapless dupes who spread seed throughout the land indiscriminately, opt for a reform of bird feeding policies? Perhaps giving lower rations to non-dom avians and supplementing fat-ball credits for those doughty few who remain our yearlong garden companions?

After all, what is an English garden without the aesthetic flurry of activity provided by these airborne performers? Those who provide the most entertainment should be given the most reward.

Showdown at the Library of Babel

THE HOUSE of Knowles-Smith is in disarray. We have been found out as charlatans and thugs; such is our standing in the community that Cyril Pollockill, a local fishmonger who owns the butchers, threw a bucket of unusable offal over my brogues as I walked past his shop the other morning. Indeed, such was his outrage that he ran out a good few minutes after I passed his window, not having a bucket of such slop readily close to hand, and stopped me in the street. His reproach was an unusual - as we are miles from London, and he’s no cockney - ‘Take that, guv’nor’. A cheer went up from the other passing villagers and I hurried away up the hill to lament our familial fall.

Our great shame, if I dare utter it, is this: we have been discovered as a house with not a single work of Jorge Luis Borges and none-but-one volume of Emile Zola, and that’s in the original French. Who knew that the tastes of provincial village-folk were so exacting? Once the word was out, we had a crowd rampaging through the library and other bookshelves, pissing on the Stephen Donaldson, tossing the Isabel Allende aside, desperately trying to see if maybe even an inferior Giovanni translation of Borges’ Fictions had been pushed behind some other volumes, but, alas, no. Before I blacked out from shock, I vaguely recall the village wolf-keeper, with a hint of pity in his milky eyes, dropping several works by Marmaduke Pickthall at my feet before straightening his flat cap and waddling off home for some beans and sausages on toast.

My neighbouring friend Edmund Prygge, lepidopterist and bigwig at the local amateur-Gilbert and Sullivan company, offered a kind word and a cup of weak tea but I could tell he thought we’d brought it on ourselves, and that he laid the responsibility with me. After all, hadn’t he warned me about the 93 year-old woman who had been thrown into the river by a mob last May for having a disproportionate ratio of Flaubert to Julian Barnes novels? Good man that he is though, Edmund didn’t bloviate for too long, he just passed the Battenberg.