March of the Lemmings Page 16
10 Before my evening performance there was an afternoon show at the Dartford venue by the ’60s Irish singing group The Bachelors, which I missed. In 1971, at the age of three, I saw them sing Paul Simon’s ‘Sound of Silence’ while being held prisoner by the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, at the Birmingham Hippodrome. It was a formative experience, and one which I was subsequently to try to recreate via the lighting state for one of the numbers in Jerry Springer: The Opera. The Bachelors were fumbling about by the stage door in Dartford as I arrived, and I wanted to explain all this to them, but I thought it would be weird. Peter Glaze and Don Maclean, from Crackerjack, and Frank Carson also appeared in the pantomime, but I have no memory of them at all.
American Cornish pasties? Did King Arthur die for this?
11 March 2018
Say ‘Cornwall’ to an uncontacted pygmy brave deep in a New Zealand forest and his bamboo flute will swiftly carve the shape of the Cornish pasty into the Shotover riverbank sands. ‘Oggy, oggy, oggy,’ he will cry, as he mimes pushing a too-hot Cornish pasty into his unambiguously delighted face. ‘Oggy, oggy, oggy!’
But last Monday, the feast day of Cornwall’s proud St Piran, American food industry lobbyists revealed plans to exploit the end of our protection by the EU’s regional foods scheme. American ‘Cornish’ pasties could be on their way into Britain. And yet Arthur, who swore to return if his land was imperilled, sleeps soundly still in his Tintagel cave.1
American Cornish pasties? Say the horrible words and savour their bitter taste. Was this desecration what Leave-voting Cornwall voted for? Did proud Cornwall want the crusty foodstuff that has made Kernow beloved worldwide replaced by a foul foreign fake? Did Arthur die on adulterous Mordred’s lance to see the sacred pasty cuckolded so? Did Henry Jenner, bard of Boscawen-Un, strive to revive Cornwall’s lost language just so his cultural inheritors could ask the man in Pengenna Pasties for a King-Size American? Did the noble Cornish folk want nothing more than to be Donald Trump’s Brexit pasty whores? Because that is all they are! Especially the people from London who own cottages there!! And Rick Stein!!!
The Leave-voting Cornish comedian Jethro Tull has appeared twice on the Leave-voting comedian Jim Davidson’s Generation Game show, demonstrating how to make Cornish pasties.2 During one sequence, Tull mocked the interfering EU for insisting pasty preparers wear gloves. Now, he and Davidson will be able to fly to America and see Cornish pasties being made by Hispanic slave labour from factory-farmed, hormone-ridden cattle, which are doused in petroleum, reduced to pulp and squeezed from automatic tubes into pre-moulded pasty pastry Hot Cornwall Pockets™®. Doubtless they are delighted.
If he could see the meat and potato atrocities about to be enacted in the name of his beloved Cornish pasties, Cornwall’s holy St Piran would turn in his grave, had his remains not been split up and sent all around the country in the fourteenth century. As it is, one of St Piran’s arms revolves in Exeter Cathedral, the other in Waltham Abbey, while his missing head spins somewhere undisclosed in St Piran’s Old Church, Perranzabuloe.
In the Mad Max dystopia of our post-Brexit nation, it is unlikely hungry Britannia will have the luxury of rejecting Donald Trump’s food regulation-relaxing advances, no matter how many times she slaps his tiny hands away from her cool thigh. Scotch whiskies, Melton Mowbray pork pies, Jersey Royal potatoes, Solihull stickleback slices3 and Cumberland sausages, all sourced from the finest American processing plants, will soon foul our patriotic British palates. First they came for the West Cornwall Pasty Company. And then they came for me.
I will miss the West Cornwall Pasty Company’s cheery wayside retail outlets, a Greggs for road-worn wayfarers who fear not the harsh crust nor the hot steak steam. Doubtless they are soon to close when cheap American imports undercut the business, sending hundreds of gainfully employed Cornish pasty-makers back to their old ancestral ways of piracy, smuggling and wrecking. The West Cornwall Pasty Company’s honest fayre is one of the comforts of the road for an endlessly touring comedian,4 and last week I needed my Cornish culinary compensation.
During these final weeks of my eighteen-month stand-up comedy tour around broken Brexit Britain, I have been reading the 1967 novel Ice, by the science-fiction pioneer and heroin enthusiast Anna Kavan, newly rescued from oblivion by Peter Owen Publishers. Ice eerily depicts a man travelling through a Kafkaesque collapsing society, beset by an encroaching ice age, against the backdrop of some imminent but unspecified political catastrophe. What ghostly forces of guidance compelled me to read this prophetic novel at this exact moment in time? Mother? Are you there? Is that you?
On Thursday night, I and my tour manager were trapped in Bristol by the Beast from the East5 and I was denied two days back with my resentful family in London, as we remained there until Sunday and a date in Plymouth. An audience member’s ice-skidding car had crashed into the loading doors of the Bristol theatre, where it remained for days, blocking our exit, closing the Overton window of our departure and tripling our hotel bill. I missed the kids and sat in reading Ice, worrying about their futures until my heart ached.
On Sunday we set off towards Plymouth.6 Though the sudden snow was thawing, all along the A386 abandoned cars lay shipwrecked in laybys, ditched during Thursday’s snowstorm and now stripped clean of parts and fabrics, the Devonshire locals reverting to type at the first sign of social breakdown.
At the Fox Tor café in Princetown, high on Dartmoor, above the prehistoric stone rows of Merrivale, I suspended my diet to stand and scoff a Cornish pasty, looking out across the ancient, frost-flecked landscape of the nation that made me. The pasty was good eating, and authentically Cornish too, but there was a bitter aftertaste not of its own making. As I ate into the pasty, I felt the very notion of Britain itself being eaten away, like some kind of enormous metaphor.
On his Cornish deathbed in 1934, the last Cornish words of the Cornish-language revivalist Henry Jenner were: ‘Here in Cornwall, we do not need other meat and pastry products. The whole object of my life has been to inculcate into the Cornish people, and the Cornish pasties, a sense of their Cornishness. Either that chicken and mushroom slice goes or I do. Aaaagh!’7
How sad that Brexit befouls Jenner’s legacy and turns his Cornish pasty to cows’ dungs in our mouths. Wake, proud Arthur! Wake and bake!!
It’s just ‘Jethro’ for the Cornish comedian. Jethro Tull is a ’70s rock band, named after the 17th/18th century English agricultural pioneer. Jonoisalive
‘… reduced to pulp and squeezed from automatic tubes into pre-moulded pasty pastry …’ Too late – at least one major ‘pasty’ producer has been doing this for years and its products bear the description ‘Cornish pasty’ on their packaging. Fortunately there has been a revival of proper Cornish pasty baking by a number of small and even medium-sized pasty shops over the last few years and I’ve bought pasties that even my gran would have been proud to serve – and she was practically supernatural in the pasty-baking stakes! I’ve always done my best, since the early 1960s, to keep myself aware of where the nearest good pasty shop was. However, there seem to be many more decent to good pasty shops now than there were 20 or 30 years ago. This was the point I was trying, albeit not too clearly, to make. One of the salient points about pasties is that they are designed to be carried away – to work, on a walk, on a boat-fishing trip, whatever. They are a complete meal in a handy and completely recyclable wrapping. And a good pasty is food that’s too good for any mere god. Bergisman
Disappointing that Stewart Lee should include a reference to Mad Max but not use the opportunity to have a third dig in a row at frenemy Brendan McCarthy this week. Feralprole
It’s great comedy when remoaners attempt faux outraged patriotism. Structuralengineer79
Lies. All lies from Big Pasty. The pasty industry want you to believe they’re all made by quaint Cornish villagers but they’re all made by monstrous machines. Where are the machines made? Not by hand by Cornish people! That’s a fact! Now go away! Loopdig
gs
Anna Kavan had heroin recommended by her tennis coach, to improve her serve. This is where i have been going wrong. Polish French
As soon as I read ‘Oggy …’ used in relation to an apparently isolated community referred to in derogatory terms, I changed my reading style for this article from Detail to Gist. And I have felt the need to comment. This article is not worthy of the esteemed newspaper it has been included in. Please refer the author of this article to the Daily Mail when they wish to publish their thoughts in future. Chris D Horner
As a Cornishman I have to say what an imbecilic article. The name of the Cornish comedian is just Jethro, real name Geoffrey J Rowe, Jethro Tull was a rock band! And thirdly the Cornish have huge connections with the United States, the Cornish emigrated there in large numbers for mining, whaling and farming. I myself have family there. Americans pilgrimage to Cornwall daily seeking out their heritage. I believe most Cornish would be less offended by a pasty manufactured by Cornish Americans than someone from London. And you wonder why Cornwall voted leave? JB1968
No, his name is Geoffrey J Rowe Tull, hence Jethro Tull. The rock band Jethro Tull is named after him, and he also invented the seed drill during an episode of the Generation Game, by accident. Mick Conley
No it’s not, there’s no Tull in his name! JB1968
I think you’re mistaken. His last name is actually Tull. And the J stands for Jethro, that’s why he’s called Jethro. He just drops the Tull bit for his stage name. Mick Conley
‘Say “Cornwall” to an uncontacted pygmy brave deep in a New Zealand’? I find it hard to believe that I have just read this. I thought it was common knowledge that the use of the word ‘pygmy’ is considered by many people to be racist. Stewart Lee once said: ‘the kind of people that say “political correctness gone mad” are usually using that phrase as a kind of cover action to attack minorities’. ‘Uncontacted pygmy’? Over to you, Stewart Lee. Luftwaffe
Who is Jethro Tull the comedian? Jethro be his name and nothing added. Roger Hyde
That’s where you’re wrong: his name is Geoffrey J(ethro) Rowe Tull. He drops the Tull from his stage name to make things easier for his audience. Mick Conley
The name of the comedian is Jethro. I know because I saw a snide DVD in a bootsale with ‘Best of Jethro’ hand-written on it. I didn’t buy it, though. I think Cornish yokel comedians is a bit like minstrelsy. Jethro Tull is bearded prancing flute player. Alexito
1 I chose to do my O-level history project on the difference between the King Arthur of history and the King Arthurs of literature and myth (you could do whatever you wanted, and most of the boys chose to study either Football, the Electric Guitar or the Holocaust). Thus, at fifteen, I had a working knowledge of the works of the Dark Ages chroniclers Nennius and Gildas, and of the medieval romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Godefroi de Leigni. My life since has been a gradual backsliding into ignorance, it seems. The summer after O-levels, in 1984, I remember discoursing fluently on the subject of Nennius with an antiques dealer at the Cornwall hippy/crusty rock festival the Elephant Fayre, which my mum reluctantly allowed me to attend alone as I was desperate to view The Fall for the first time, who played by the light of flaming brands in their mighty double-drum-kit incarnation. It was the greatest night of my life to date. My Nennius lecture seemed to last all night, as did the version of ‘The Fool on the Hill’ played by the covers band in the little tent where a nice lady had given me an unusual-tasting cup of tea. I mean, they must have played it for hours, round and round and round, with that crazy fairground-organ break. It was only years later that I worked out I had had my first psychedelic experience without even realising. The morning after seeing The Fall, and being spiked with psilocybin tea, I woke up in a field feeling ill. In the afternoon, I crapped rivers of blood in Gordano services, on the M4. And by the evening, I had been hospitalised in Birmingham with ulcerative colitis, my father having swiftly despatched me back to my mother’s care at the first sign of trouble. Though this condition was to plague me for years, at least it kept me reasonably slim until my mid-thirties, and the worse I felt, and the more I bled, the better I looked. I wonder if the vision of medieval monks I saw at Fountains Abbey thirty years later was connected to my unwitting adolescent ingestion of hallucinogens, or did they, like my mother, have a message for me?
2 I don’t know the transmission date of either of the Jethro/Davidson pasty collaborations, and it has been impossible to check, but the footage is on YouTube.
3 In 1970s Solihull, there were always sticklebacks in any freshwater between my home and the city centre, in the little streams and brooks that I played in as I crossed the fields of Tudor Grange school, Alderbrook school and the Technical College on my way to the park, unafraid of knife-wielding teens and predatory paedophiles, though in retrospect that latter were all around us, grabbing our pre-pubescent testicles in the showers or the bunk beds to see if our voices were due to break soon. Now, like the invertebrates, the sticklebacks are all gone and the world is visibly dying around us. It is strange to be able to have the thought, ‘I took sticklebacks for granted,’ but I did. We all did. In 1973, I watched from the passenger seat, thrilled, as a wild hare charged along Arnold Road, Shirley, in front of my grandfather’s car, having bolted from an ancient scrap of bluebell wood that had somehow survived between Ralph Road and Jacey Road, finally cut off from the Warwickshire wilderness by the outward expansion of Birmingham. I have only seen hares twice more in my life: once in the fields near Chedworth Roman Villa, in Gloucestershire; and again in Orkney, on the week of my fiftieth. Nearly half a century later, that urban-hare story seems unimaginable, like I’m saying I saw an ostrich in the back garden or a seal in an open sewer.
4 I am currently too heavy, remember, to use some waterslides. Life on the road comes with collateral damage.
5 The Beast from the East is the name of a now-annual cold wave of weather. It was this that trapped me in Bristol, and not Dokken’s 1988 live album of the same name, recorded, predictably, in Japan.
6 It occurs to me as I read this that I have spent most of my adult life on the move between gigs, like I was afraid of stasis. I’ve just booked another trip to Orkney. I want to get to the outlying islands this time, the ones you need to either charter a boat or take a weekly light aircraft flight to reach. I want to look at the crumbled funereal structures of dead civilisations on a blue-sky day at the very end of our islands, and to be beyond reach of mobile phones, staring into the northern horizon.
7 Supposedly, on his deathbed, Oscar Wilde said, ‘This wallpaper will be the death of me. One of us will have to go,’ which is remembered in the popular imagination as ‘Either this wallpaper goes or I will.’ (The Australian comedian Greg Fleet has a classic routine about this idea.) On his deathbed, Henry Jenner said, ‘The whole object of my life has been to inculcate into Cornish people a sense of their Cornishness.’ Not as funny as Wilde’s quip, admittedly, but not without merit.
Stay focused, Brexiteers. Russia is not the enemy
18 March 2018
Last Sunday, diners at the Salisbury Zizzi were belatedly advised to burn all their clothes as a precautionary measure;1 as was anyone who had ever visited a Jamie’s Italian, but for different reasons. Enemies of Putin expire and nuclear threats are proliferating across the Earth. Perhaps the trademark robust diplomacy of the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, deployed via scatological limericks in his chicken-feed Telegraph column, might defuse the tension?2
Needless to say, shameless Remoaners are already exploiting the Salisbury poisoning to sabotage Brexit. Is there no pig trough low enough into which they will not now stoop themselves?3 Even given Russia’s nuclear threats, we must not be so weak as to go, dunce’s cap in hand, to the Brussels fat cats who gerrymandered us into building wheelchair access ramps in libraries and planting wild-flower meadows. Brexit means Brexit.
Unfortunately for diehard traitors, when Mrs May described ‘an indiscriminate and reckless act against
the UK, putting innocent civilians at risk’, she was talking of the Salisbury poisoning, not hard Brexit.
Brexiteers must remember that Britain’s real enemy is not our anti-EU ally Russia and her toxic Novichok. Britain’s real enemies are Michel Barnier, Donald Tusk, Jean-Claude Juncker, Peter Stringfellow, Lily Allen, Marcus Brigstocke, all High Court judges and endless bloody red tape! Better to live free for a day in a Britain full of rogue killers roaming Italian restaurants with nerve agents than to live a thousand years as the straight-banana slaves of Brussels!
We have all seen the famous film of an un-trousered Putin riding wild boar piglets bareback in the snow. Is it time to be talking of freezing our Front National-funding Russian allies’ assets, especially when Putin’s own assets seem resistant to cold?
Christ, I can’t keep this forced nonsensical tone going any more, even to provoke the usual online Kremlin gremlin comments. I’m on tour, and it’s Tuesday in a Dundee hotel. I have to file this tomorrow from Perth by close of business, and the story unravels as quickly as I can rewrite it. Since I started scribbling, Rex Tillerson’s4 disappeared, the Sun says a Russian’s been strangled in New Malden5 and even Stephen Hawking’s and Ken Dodd’s deaths look like Putin might have had a hand in them. Did anyone toxicity-test the telescope and the tattyfilarious tickling stick? Thought not.
The Brexit British are a joke now. Putin knows no one will stick their neck out for those wankers. I don’t know anything about Russia anyway. Someone online in Russia has a tattoo based on one of my stand-up routines. And I have a Russian relative who is nice.