Dear Uncle Drago,
I live in the countryside (I hope to move into a house soon) and I feel I must put pen to paper (not that I have a pen, or any paper, but you must humour my whim I fear).
Now I am lost for words. It's all the brackets. That's what stymied me with the algh, the aljibrae, the algiebrar, the maths at school. I got bewildered by brackets. I always reckoned when I wrote my arto, orto, aughto, life story, I would call it "Bewildered By Brackets". That is, until I found out that Barry Lyndon, the 18th century rake and woodworker, had already used that title in a pamphlet explaining why he was giving up the woodwork for a life of European rakery. Well, his pamphlet was actually called "Bewildered by Bracketf" since they used to swap the letter f and the letter s around in those days, but it amounts to the same thing. It didn't do him any harm, because he got a 15-hour film made about him by Stanley Rubrick, the movie-maker and puzzle cube inventor.
Of course, I am aware that Lyndon's weren't the same kind of brackets as mine anyway. But I do think that the fact that Stanley Rubrick invented a cube puzzle is germane, though the story was originally written by Anthony Tolstoy, the novelist and inventor of the satellite which was named "Telstar" after him in a clever play on word-music. Then there was popular beat group The Shadows, who sang an instrumental hymn of praise to the majestic Telstar and combined it with an homage to the noble Apache, in a telling commentary on the march of progress.
Where was I? Ah, yes, being a country dweller I am appalled at the fact that, were I intending to attempt to speak to a young relative about the "birds and the bees", then I should be at a loss.
You can't get the birds, or the bees, these days. They have all been eradicated, be it by the farmer's pesti, inspesti, inspecto, insecta, stuff they spray on crops to kill insects.
You know, soon we will have a nation populated by eggo, eggsent, igorsent, selfish fools. We will be overrun by human parodies of themselves.
The countryside is no longer fit for kings as it indeed was in the day of yore, when Ethelred the Unsteady held sway, and Hereford the Wake carried people's bulls across the River Severn in defiance of King Norman's Magnum Carto which outlawed the transportation of livestock by means of cart without a permit in French (King Norman was something of a wordsmith, or perhaps his barons were, when you look at the way they utilised the French "carte" and the English "cart" in tandem).
Blodwyn Rattler
Cullompton
