Notebook from Nowhere, 26/05/2011

[N.B.: Owing to a Noteable Lack of Material Posted in these Last Weeks, Yr Humble Scribe, by way of Small Recompense, does this Week present Two Notebooks from Nowhere, this One appearing earlier than its usual date.]

some villages have cheese-rolling, others the soul cake, and some few have peculiar and quaint derivations of ancient pagan custom. Few, however, with the notable exception of Little Quinisext, engage in competitive art manifesto-writing, however.  The sport’s unique popularity in these parts is generally put down to the influence of Old Ned Grumble, the local avant-garde painter and part-time cannibal, who has, for the last thirty-eight years, lived in a dilapidated studio just inside the grounds of the dilapidated Smale Manor. Old Ned began manifesto-writing in 1981, with his first art manifesto, Pederasty is the Triumph of Civilisation, which was widely interpreted as an attack on Thatcherism. The six-inch white, plastic cube was covered in news stories relating to the plight of birds of prey in the British Isles. It was his 1993 manifesto, Squall, however, which brought him notoriety when part of it – a photograph of seven dead bees on a page of blank musical staves – appeared in the background of a picture in The Daily Excess of Tracy Emin. The competition began soon after, and for the last eighteen years has been judged by Old Ned in the village hall on the feast of St. Dunstan. This year’s winning entrant, Newsletter of the Society For the Embalming of Zsa Zsa Gabor was written by Dr Hentwither, the village’s resident dyspeptic classicist, as single German compound word, in the form of  a gerund, on no fewer than 61 beermats from the local pub. Old Ned described the entry as “just magnificent”.

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the much wyttring half-marathon has been cancelled at the last moment for the third month in a row, owing to an inauspicious alignment of the planets. Mrs Agrippinilla Jones-Hargreave,  who was elected leader of the Annual Half-Marathon Steerage Committee for this year, explained that owing to a “minor miscalculation”, the marathon could not take place next Tuesday as agreed,  as the conjunction of Io and Deimos would leave local ley-lines charged with negative energies “likely to cause a breach of the peace”.  Mrs Jones-Hargreave is also head of the local neighbourhood watch.