Thomas Jones

Towards the end of And When Did You Last See your Father? (1993), Blake Morrison says:

When Murray Gell-Mann proposed the existence of a kind of sub-atomic particle in 1964, he came up with the name ‘quark’ after a phrase in Finnegans Wake: ‘Three Quarks for Muster Mark!’ A new kind of genetically modified flax resistant to herbicides has been developed in Canada and christened ‘triffid’, allegedly in honour of a nebula – Alan McHughen, the scientist responsible, may be a mild-mannered biologist by day, but at night he’s an amateur astronomer. He’s dismissive of fears that the association with John Wyndham’s 1950s novel won’t do the controversy-strewn world of GM any favours; and he’s done that clever thing of appropriating an opponent’s discourse: the Canadian triffid is an ironic (and more modern) riposte to all the talk about Frankenstein foods and the like. Anyone looking for a good reason to distrust genetic science, however, need look no further than Brewer’s Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable. It’s not published till November, but Cassell have sent out a taster of sample entries, including one for Dolly, ‘the world’s first cloned sheep, born on 5 July 1996 at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh’. Perhaps Gell-Mann would have called her Molly, but the depressing fact is that she was named after the ‘full-figured country singer Dolly Parton’ because she was cloned from a cell nucleus taken from another sheep’s udder. And this, we are supposed to believe, is progress; though the hopelessly optimistic or paranoid might see some cosmic connection in the fact that ‘quark’ is a variety of low-fat, soft cheese made from skimmed milk.

By now everyone must know the deal: if 75 per cent of people who download the monthly installments of Stephen King’s ‘new’ online novel, The Plant, pay for it, he’ll keep on churning it out. Addressing visitors to his website as ‘my friends’, he urges them to ‘Remember: Pay and the story rolls. Steal and the story folds. No stealing from the blind newsboy!’ Since the man’s sight is rapidly failing him, the last sentence has its own macabre twist – ‘vintage King’, as the pundits might say. Cynics might reply that King is in fact banking on only, say, 60 per cent of his readers forking out. He wrote the first three episodes back in the early 1980s (he nonchalantly makes a virtue out of the epistolary story being ‘set … before e-mail … when even the fax was a fringe technology’). As long as fewer than three quarters of readers cough up, he’ll have effortlessly, even wordlessly fulfilled his promise to his fans that they’d have something new this summer – he took a sabbatical following a nasty road accident – while earning at least a few dollars, one per honest reader per pre-prepared episode. Money for old rope, to buy King more time.’‘

In 1793, the scholars of Winchester College revolted, in response to the cancellation of an Easter holiday. They barricaded themselves inside the College quadrangle and, having armed themselves with stolen pistols and stones removed from the buildings, took to the rooftops, where they hoisted the red cap of liberty and bombarded the soldiers who came to put a stop to the rebellion. The authorities finally got them to surrender with some false diplomacy, and the net result was 35 expulsions. Today, the school is quite proud of the ‘Great Rebellion’: the English establishment thrives on tricks of this kind – witness the Shelley memorial at University College, Oxford. The first time I saw If …, Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 fable of public school rebellion, was at a screening organised by Winchester College’s film society.’‘

Wicked Etiquette: Over Seven Hundred Faux pas to Avoid – in Bed and out (Collins and Brown, 192 pp., £9.99, 22 June, 1 85585 795 2) is an anthology of mainly Victorian advice collected by Sarah Kortum from such books as the anonymous Gems of Deportment (1880) and Things that Are Not Done by Edgar and Diana Woods (1937). In 1860, The Perfect Gentleman, the work of ‘a Gentleman’, suggested: ‘Do not praise bad wine, for it will persuade those who are judges that you are an ignoramus or a flatterer.’ The similarly anonymous 19th-century author of The American Code of Manners (would it have been bad manners for these people to sign their pronouncements?) advised its readers not to ‘say of anything which you enjoy at table: “I love it,” “I love melons,” “I love peaches,” “I adore grapes” – these are schoolgirl utterances … Love is an emotion of the heart, but not one of the palate.’ Whoever s/he was can’t have read Fielding, In Tom Jones (1749), ‘what is commonly called love’ is defined as ‘the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh’. Not all of the ‘gems’ concern table manners; that’s just one of eleven chapters. Other subjects covered include letter-writing: ‘use as few parentheses as possible,’ Emily Thorwell wrote (in The Lady’s Guide to Complete Etiquette, published in 1886). ‘It is a clumsy way of disposing of a sentence, and often embarrasses the reader.’ The best and the worst nuggets are both reprinted on the back cover. The best is ‘never start an argument unless you are well-dressed,’ the worst: ‘to invariably commence a conversation by remarks on the weather shows a poverty of ideas that is truly pitiable.’ The weather’s fine by me, just so long as you don’t talk like that. The anthology, illustrated by Ronald Searle, has a charming dedication ‘to the Unknown Man whose photograph was found hidden in a copy of the Bazar Book of Decorum (1870)’.