Like a Duck Against Thunder
Concerning a one-sided wedding; a ubiquitious accessory; a judgmental toothbrush and a buzzer puzzle, or puzzle of buzzers.
What did the crab do?
Some Victorian ‘Cornish Proverbs and Phrases’, as recorded by Joseph Thomas, 'late of St. Michael's Mount, Marazion', in 1895.
Scrumped up like a hedgehog
All one side, like a crab going to gaol.
Always head and chief, like Jimmy Eellis 'mong the cats.
Gaping like a duck against thunder.
Worse than dirty butter and bally-ack
All on one side, like Smoothy's wedding.
And my absolute favourite:
Like Ludlow's dog - leaning against the wall to bark
('Bally-ack', by the way, is an ache in the belly. Not where you were thinking. )
News and Ads
The Researcher’s First Murder
So, last weekend, Amazon suddenly cut the price of TRFM by almost half, from £25 down to the curiously specific £13.56. To be clear, I didn’t know they were going to do this (and I don’t know how long it will last), and I’m sorry if you shelled out £25 last week. After a bit of slightly panicky googling, I discover that Amazon often do this, and that people buying it at this price isn’t bad for me, in fact it’s good for me. I also discover that this might mean it’s selling well, and Amazon wants to increase the momentum; OR, it’s selling slowly, and Amazon want the shelf-space for space rocket parts; OR…no-one knows, mystic algorithm is mystic, maybe Jeff Bezos saw his own shadow when he emerged from his burrow. Anyway, if you couldn’t quite bring yourself to spend £25 on a box of postcards, but it turns out £13.56 is the exact price at which you feel like it’s worth a pop, then now is the time to pop, because apparently these price changes sometimes disappear again. (This isn’t me giving you the hard sell, by the way. These are just the facts, Ma’am.)
Oh, and for some reason, they’ve also started describing it as a paperback. It’s not a paperback. It will be a paperback next year, but right now it’s still very much a box of postcards.
Errata
Speaking of TRFM, if you’re solving it, I have some errata for you. Sorry about that, though I suppose it was inevitable in something of this size and complexity. Fortunately, none of them are terribly important, though one or two might distract.
On the card with gold and silver areas, the word Isobel should be Isabel.
On the card with the long-bearded man being pointed at, the number 50 should be 30.
On the card with the small boy and the anchor, the word Ezekial should be Ezekiel.
On the card with the right half of the gold clock face, the graph paper should extend across all of the white area.
I imagine that makes the whole puzzle perfectly clear. If you’re in groups or message boards discussing it, spread the word.
Chipping Norton Literary Festival
And if, after all that, you feel you haven’t heard me bang on about TRFM enough, then firstly, crikey, and secondly, come along to Chipping Norton on the 26th November, where I shall be banging on about it some more.
Stand Out Stand Up - Reading Hexagon.
Alternatively, to hear me not mention TRFM even once, but instead do some monologues from Souvenir Programme, come along to Reading on the 14th October, where I’m doing a fundraiser for the Slapstick Festival with Rory Bremner, Jo Brand, Miles Jupp and Arthur Smith.
Commentary Box, on
Re Milo the strong man and solo bull-eater, Toblerones brings word of King Shaka of the Zulus supposedly having a professional glutton in his court, whose signature performance was eating a goat at a sitting. In response, v.Edgy wonders if he was “the GOAT goat eater.” Boh.
Re the Osmanification of all light mystery book covers, Dr Bob says:
According to this article, the Richard Osman book cover phenomenon (or ROBCoP as the cool kids are now calling it) dates back to a book written by Dawn French 9 years earlier.
Thank you, doctor. Though if we cool kids are going to use the second letter of ‘cover’ in our acronym, then let’s use the second letter of ‘book’ as well, so we can call it ROBoCoP.
Re the toy tea set with ‘coffee’ written all over it, Toblerones is surprised:
given that coffee is - from what I've heard - known by very similar words in almost every language apart from a few which originate from the same region as the coffee plant.
This reminds me of a favourite fact I heard about tea: that if the word you use for tea sounds a bit like ‘Cha’, then the country your language originated in got its tea by land (eg, Hindi, Russian, Turkish); but if it sounds a bit like ‘Te’ then it got by sea (eg, English, Afrikaans, Maori.) And if it’s ‘herbata’, then you're Polish, and I don’t know how you got your tea. Sounds like you grew it yourself… but I’ve been to Poland, and I don’t think you did.
And re Venn diagrams, Kay declares a surprisingly vehement hatred of Venn and all his diabolically overlapping works. She will be dismayed to see that at his old college, Gonville and Caius, he is memorialised with a stained glass window:
Great Minds
Last week, I stayed somewhere where someone once owned, or at least thirsted for information about, Yorkshire terriers. And I was struck that, whatever differences of opinion the authors of these works may have had about Yorkshire terriers, they were apparently in absolute accord not just about whether or not they should wear a little bow on their heads, but what colour that little bow should be.
I say that… of course we can’t be sure what colour bow Ethel Munday preferred. Maybe she was an outlier. A free thinker. A maverick…
Sketch Book
And here we bid a tearful goodbye to Thrifty Squadron, while Spendy Squadron join me in the smoking room to hear about the tense psychological battle of wits I’m having with a toothbrush; and to have a crack at a new puzzle I’ve made, in which I invite you to break into my escape room.
Love,
The Airport