Undercover Nooses Play the Long Game: 2.

'And she didn't help you up?'
'No. Just left me where she'd knocked me over.'
'I think we should move, Piglet.'
'I hear what you're saying.'
'Is that Mr Dude's lingo again? So, let me get it all straight--this journalist--'
'Carmella Long…'
'Was running past the Old Spinney to--say it again?'
'Escape execution by two cats who might not be cats.'
'And what had she done?'
'Well, apparently, she sent out a twat.'
'Pardon?'
'Tigger says it's a little gizmo message to anyone who'll listen. And many more who just happen to be in the wrong place at the time. And her twat was proper unkind to Major Tom's friends for being so sad that he'd gone…you know…Up There. Said she couldn't feel what they were feeling.'
'Ah, right, so, since she couldn't feel it, it couldn't possibly be true.'
'"Man Up!" That's what she told them.'
'But that's not right, Piglet.'
'How so? Sow ho?'
'Well, Owl said…you know, some of Major Tom's friends were . . . well, majors who were sort of majorettes… or vice reversal … or neither … or other.'
'Ah, I know that one! "If other, please append supporting statement".'
'Right, so if they were one or other or one and other or both or neither or supporting statement appenders--'
'Yes?'
'Well, just saying "Man Up" is about as helpful as saying … I don't know … "Antimacassar Up!" or "Adorable Little Black-and-White Puppy Up"!'
'Androgyne. That's the word Owl used.'
'So this Dame Aux Caramels should have said "Androgyne Up!"?'
'Yes. Or, to put it as she spoke when she knocked me down, "F****** Androgyne the F**k Up!".'
'Goodness, she likes saying her little dotty things. Those--'
'Asteroids, Pooh. She ran out of them with me.'
'Saying what?'
'Get the F**k out of my way you f****** little oiky oink, I know your f****** sort, f********************state school ******f*************foodbank f**********rickets**************.'
'Sounds odder than Tigger's funny phrases--stretching the antelope and all that.'
'Well, when you say a lot of asteroids together, it comes out rrrr.'
'So mainly she was standing over you going Frrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.'
'Exactly. Frrrrrrrrrrrr.'
'What a jolly way to spend the rest of this walk home.'
'Eh?'
'We can pretend to send a twat. Are you sure that's the word?'
'Tigger says.'
'Well, if Tigger says … mmm, no, never mind. All right, here we go, Piglet. Carmella Long's Undispatched Twat. Ready?'
'Ready!'
'Frrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr sound of me own voice--'
'Frrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr everything tickety-boo for the likes of us--'
'Frrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr totes lols obvs--'
'Frrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr it's all about meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee--'
'Oh, gosh, Piglet, this is jolly.'

Undercover nooses playing the Long game.

"So many people 'crying' or 'in bits' over Bowie. F**K YOU. You are not ten - you are an adult. Man the f**k up and say something interesting. It is so deeply insincere watching all of this, that's all. I think grief should be private."
London Times reporter Camilla Long comforts the afflicted and harbours the harbourless (Huffington Post, 12.01.16)

'Do you think this will work?'
''Course it will. No-one'll suspect.'
'I hope not.'
'Nice bit of undercover work, if I say so myself. Who'd guess that a couple of hangman's nooses would--'
'Neese.'
'What?'
'Plural of noose. You know, like goose . . . geese.'
'Oh dear, oh dear...you won't stay long at the top of the game if you start worrying--'
'But it's got to be correct. For all the ladies and gentlemen. It's a public post.'
'Round which I shall have no compunction in wrapping you if you keep on. Now...who'd guess that a couple of nooses--'
'Neese.'
'I can always arrange for you to see out your days supporting a wilted hanging basket in an unregarded corner of one of our less visited look-at-the-state-of-that homes.'
'But-'
'Who-would-guess! That we were a couple of seasoned swingers. I mean, look at us. Blend right in. Pure Facebook.'
'Well, all right, but I don't want to get caught by that bear and . . . whatever the small thing is.'
'We shan't. They've gone home for the night. Now, let's have a look at the jobs pending sheet.'
'Some woman called Long. Journalist. Waits to see what everyone's feeling, then has a go at them for feeling it.'
'Ah, yes, we've encountered the like before, I think. I bray therefore I am. Let's see . . . hmm, all details appear to be in--'
'Here, you know afterwards? I mean, will they call her Twice As--'
'Stop right there!'

Spam and Facepack

'Piglet?'
'Hmm?'
'What if all of Tigger's friends from that … that thing they appear on.'
'His lapdance.'
'Yes, but the special place, Piglet. Where he actually keeps them.'
'Facepack.'
'Yes. Now what if--how many did you say he had?'
'One thousand and I've run out of fingers.'
'What if all his one thousand and I've run out of fingers Facepack friends turned up together for tea?'
'Oh, we could help out, Pooh. A cup here, a serviette there. Eeyore could do his talk on misunderstood donkeys through the ages.'
'I've just got a new jar of hunny. I suppose if we're talking sacrifice--'
'But it won't happen, Pooh.'
'No?'
'As I said before, a lot of them live a long long way away. Much further than Profile Pending.'
'Oh.'
'Steamed Sir.'
'What?'
'Steamed Sir. That's how the long way away people address Tigger in their Facepack letters.'
'Do they now?'
'Sometimes Most Steamed Sir.'
'Gosh, that sounds important. I wonder what you have to do to be Most?'
'Let yourself be steamed a bit longer, I suppose.'
'So why can't the long way away people come for tea?'
'Money, Pooh. They have no money. Well, they do, but they don't.
That's why they steam Tigger. Apparently if they can arrange to send their money to his . . . his . . . oh, what do you call where people put their money?'
'Mattress?'
'No.'
'Down their throats?'
'No.'
'The National Litter-tray?'
'No.'
'Apparently glitzy but invariably disappointing holidays?'
'No.'
'Sponsoring iguanas in Mexico?'
'No.'
'A third Boxing Day sofa?'
'No.'
'Staving off the undeniable vacuity of existence.'
'You've been talking to that rambler Mr Beckett again.'
'Well, he could give Owl a run for his money. Some of what he says--'
'Bank Counts! That's it. If they can send their money to Tigger's Bank Count, they can have it. And they say Tigger can have a bit of it, too.'
'So … they've got their money but they can't get their money.'
'Right.'
'But if they send it far away to where they can't get it, then they can get it.'
'Exactly.'
'What does Tigger do when they steam him about all this?'
'Nothing.'
'Nothing?'
'Well, not exactly nothing. He says that, when one of those messages comes in, he just sits down and eats some spam.'
'Sounds like a plan, McCann.'
'You've been talking to that other rambler Mr Dude.'
'D'you think he ever takes that dressing-gown off?'

David Bowie and Alan Rickman, January 2016

'Piglet?'
'Hmm?'
'D'you think the Sheriff of Nottingham will bump into Major Tom?'
'The Sheriff--? He's not gone too, has he?'
'Just.'
'Gosh. Well, you know, it's big. Up There. Bigger than the Hundred Acre Wood.'
'Is it? I didn't think anything was.'
'Oh, yes.'
'Goodness . . . I suppose, too, there's the matter of the shirts.'
'Shirts, Pooh?'
'He might have spilled the beans.'
'Who?'
'The Sheriff.'
'Who to? To whom? Who tomb?'
'The papers.'
'About what?'
'Tom's choice of shirts.'
'Pooh, that might not have been uppermost on his mind.'
'No, probably not. Well ... bright side, eh? They might get on famously.'
'They might at that.'
'And dance away eternity.'
'Dance?'
'Tom's hum, Piglet--
Here am I practising the can-can
far above the world.'
'Far above the world . . . gosh, they're lucky.'
'Aren't they, though.'

Slow TV finds a new convert

'Eeyore loves the television we got him for Christmas, Pooh.'
'Glad to hear it.'
'Owl went to see him last night. They're really getting into Slow TV.'
'And what might that be?'
'Oh, long shots of the same thing for ages, muffled voices if there are any, nothing much happening.'
'So . . . tv, then.'
'Without the budgets.'
'What were they watching?'
'Owl said it was a programme showing a square dark night with no moon or stars. But then a spider toddled across the universe and just sat there.'
'Is . . . is Eeyore's fusebox still kaput?'
'Now you mention it . . . .'

The cruellest month: another view

'All right, I admit it, it's not my usual line of hum.'
'Say it again, Pooh.'
'April is the cruellest month
breeding hunny out of the dead jars.'
'Does hunny breed?'
'No idea. I'm only what Tigger calls an end-process-user.'
'Oh, he's not starting up again. I had the shock of my life when I saw that whacking great flip-chart by the stream.'
'He's found something called power-point now.'
'Good grief, what's that?'
'Must be when you prod someone and growl.'
'So what does he make of your breeding hunny?'
'Haven't told him yet. Owl says it sounds just the ticket. A paradigm of the desolation which clutches the contemporary soul with icy skeletal fingers, he reckons.'
'I thought we'd agreed not to encourage him.'
'Oh. Yes. Sorry.'

The Lemmy I Knew--Virginia Woolf

So kind of L Greenlaw to hold forth about D Bowie on Front Row. It opens the gates for one. Outwards, presumably, and presumably for more than one though one is the only one of interest to one. So yes . . . naturally one remembers Lemmy. Leonard's treatlette, it was, Lewes Arts Centre, Judas Priest. Lytton, of course, positively garnished us with scorn, praising Napalm Death to the ceiling, the rafters, the coping stones, that bit about four inches above the coping stones for which I'll coin a term later. But there had been a change, a shift, a twist. Judas Priest could not attend. In their stead came Lemmy and his metallic-tinted persons, The Marauding Umlauts. Heavens, what a lark . . . and in Lemmy's case, what a plunge. He burst into my book-lined consciousness, threw Leonard out of the window and sent something flying from the rounded walnut table in the centre of my mind. The Reflections of Elizabeth Inchbold, was it? The Letters of Jane Carlyle? Series Two of Birds of a Feather? 'Drop yer knickers, darling,' he roared, 'yer've pulled.' How strange . . . how disconcerting, like the kiss of a wave, the plash of a wave, the yin of a yang. For I had pulled nothing. My knickers were still on. It was all wondrously back to front (unlike my knickers). Lemmy had confected an amuse-bouche of wordage for me and naturally I told him as much: 'I'll amuse yer bouche, love,' he Galahaded, and it was then I saw . . . heavens! The notion of the word writ down, writ plain, writ as one may say giddyingly ouverte. His wart! Can one say it?