If, on a winter's night, a traveller should come to your door and, after consulting with his wife, a haggard woman wrapped in the kind of blanket furniture-removals companies use to insulate pianos from the sides of their vans, although whether principally to protect their vehicles or the music instruments themselves is an interesting question, and one I had reason to examine in detail from a legal point of view when, during my own house removal a year ago, from Bahrain to a small island near Iceland (the supermarket, not the country), I noticed some scratch marks on the side of my own Bösendorfer, which, by the way, means "evil townsperson", an odd brand for a piano, albeit one made by a company now wholly-owned by Yamaha, once known in Britain mainly for their motorcycles but now somewhat unfocussed, with a product portfolio embracing everything from digital leaf-blowers to flatscreen spearguns and plasma dentures, a development all too familiar now to those of us who follow the fortunes of the large Japanese electronics companies, which are crumbling with alarming rapidity into irrelevance, in connection with which, by the way, I read recently that Sony no longer figures even amongst the top fifty Japanese companies by market capitalisation, and I must admit that there's been a sharp decline in my own use of the PlayStation recently, although that may have something to do with the repetitive strain injury that made my right arm seize up entirely the day after my 112th birthday, but, to retrace my steps (because I'm aware that this question is starting to get a little confusing, with all the complex syntax and the various branching subclauses linked into the flow of the sentence by conjunctions like "notwithstanding", notwithstanding the fact that I hadn't used "notwithstanding" right up until this parenthetical and meta-ouroborositical, if that's even a word, yes, meta-ourobositical example, damn it, spell-checker, stop underlining these words in red when they're perfectly valid, everybody knows that the ouroboros is the snake that swallows its own tail, and that if there is an adjectival form of the word it would be following perfectly normal English practice for it to be something like "ourobositical", on the model of "parasitical", or perhaps simply "ourobositic", I think I'll close my parentheses here), as I was saying, to retrace my steps - and I hope you're still reading this, Dog Latin, though I could certainly understand that you might have better things to do with your time, like for instance watching paint dry in one of those interesting BBC home make-over programmes which, in retrospect, were the sparkling film on the flimsy property bubble from which we all either profited or lost out, but, to get back to the gypsies on your driveway, or, to be more precise, the travellers on your driveway, on a winter's night, would you - to put this finally in the form of a question you might conceivably be able to answer, though I'm certainly not expecting, let alone demanding, a reply from you, even if you have set things up in a semi-challenge format with a kind of "I will answer all questions posed" structure, though, granted, with an added caveat that questions about your genitals will not be answered, or at least not with any serious statistics, though perhaps some lighthearted banter such as might be encountered in a pub lavatory when, thinking we're alone at the urinal, we are joined by an unwholesome fellow who insists - when there is plenty of spare room and even adjacent urinals whose plumbing arrangements are entirely separate from the one we are using, though of course he may be a homosexual and be choosing this place of proximity deliberately in order to study our genitals at the closest-possible socially-acceptable range, and even to catch a whiff of their particular odour and flavour - lighthearted banter, I say, resembling the kind that we will probably start to engage in ourselves in order to defuse the palpable sexual tension now hanging in the air and preventing our fleshy nozzles from discharging their payload of micturant waste, in the hypothetical scenario I embarked upon a few lines back and now wish, to be frank, I hadn't broached, for I have, if truth be told, some hangups of my own in that department, but fortunately, Dog Latin, you have already ruled "out of bounds" all references to that private organ, and therefore I will retrace my steps, as promised, eschewing all mention of the skull, the skull in Connemara, no, wait, that's not right, all reference to the evil townsfolk who live inside the damaged piano for which, I meant to reveal, I was paid the princely sum of £1500 in compensation damages in the court of assizes, that being, in the judge's view (and he was a keen amateur pianist himself, though I do not intend any smutty double entendres when I use the term "pianist", given the ban on genital references under which we are all currently working), the actual diminution in the value of my Austrian piano, consequent upon its damage by the ribald men in blue smocks whose cavalier attitude, I must say, would have irritated me enormously had I not, at some no doubt subconscious level, found them rather attractive in a roguish way, and spent perhaps a little too long watching them from my rapidly-emptying study, pretending to read my battered copy of The Anathemata by David Jones, the Welsh poet, I mean, not the late David Jones of The Monkees, or David Robert Jones of Brixton, who later changed his name to Bowie, and was, like me, a bisexual who never had a homosexual experience, unless we believe his bitter ex-wife who, in her memoir, claims to have found him in bed with the man he called "Mike" Jagger, since apparently everybody who knows Mick calls him "Mike" rather than "Mick", and in fact, laughs out loud whenever they hear people refer to him as "Mick", the way friends of Dr Henry Jekyll might when hearing someone refer to him as "Hyde", but, to return to my question, Dog Latin, and bring it to its fruitful conclusion, as the Very Reverend Laurence Sterne would perhaps put it, when referring to his father's twin habits of winding the clock and enjoying his wife, in that order, so that his wife, upon hearing the clock being wound, would, by pre-Pavlovian association, know that the chores and labours of conception - but the conception, in this instance, of a future literary hero, though one whose birth is never reached, due to the structure of the narrative itself, and its infuriating habit of taking two steps back for every one forward - awaited her mere minutes after, as soon as her husband had extinguished the candle and climbed into bed with her, but where were we, ah yes, the skull in Connemara, no, wait, the gypsies upon the path coming up to your door, Dog Latin, but I insist I never specified they were gypsies, for that is a despicable racialist appellation, but merely travellers, cold on a winter's night and no doubt desirous of some shelter in your garden, perhaps a comfortable spot beneath your trellises, should you in fact have trellises, or perhaps merely a grassy knoll which would give their gaily decorated caravan - and I don't mean to imply that they have one, because, remember, I have been scrupulously careful not to insist that they were Romany people, let alone stereotypical Romany people or, heaven forfend, "gypsies", a term, by the way, I abhor, but, and I want to pose this question in the clearest and simplest way I know how, Dog Latin, is it your general feeling that these are people you wish to assist with shelter, in a samaritarian way, and I see my spellchecker has spattered dotted red lines - the textual equivalent of screaming blue murder - beneath the adjective "samaritarian", but it seems to me entirely logical that, should there be such a thing as a generic samaritan, then to behave like him must surely be "samaritarian", but again the blood spatters beneath the word, and again I am staring into the empty sockets of the skull, the skull in Connemara, so I will simply conclude, as directly as I can, with the appeal to your samaritarian... but no, no, I cannot stand the blood, the rising tide of typographic blood is drowning my subordinate clauses one by one, all is disorder, this sentence is sinking fast to the grammatical equivalent of Davy Jones' locker, and I now realise I should have included that Davy Jones in my list as well, don't you think, Dog Latin?
― Grampsy, Monday, 13 August 2012 13:47 (eleven years ago) link