Review: A Nest of Ninnies by Robert Armin and others (Edited by P.M Zall)

 I’m playing Feste the Fool in a production of Twelfth Night and was delighted to discover that the originator of the role is clearly known, a man called Robert Armin. What’s more, he was not only a performer but a writer of ballads, plays and other assorted works. One of this was Fool Upon Fool, a book about different kinds of fools using supposed biographies of different kinds of fool. He later worked this into a slightly more philosophical piece called A Nest of Ninnies. I was able to find a copy of it bound up with selections from other jest and fool books of the early modern period, also titled A Nest of Ninnies.

In the introduction, Zall says how the seventeenth century was a big time for jest books. They’d circulated in earlier centuries but were now being printed and distributed, suggesting that is was likely there were more readers for these jest books than people who read Milton. There had always been two main sources of jests, collections of witticisms that had been collected from classical works and homegrown jests and shaggy dog stories. He says that during this period, the form was undergoing a change, splitting into ‘joque’ books and jest biographies. This jest biographies fed into other fictional biographies that provided one of the early models of the novel.

I’ve rifled through some nineteenth century jest books, and it’s fair to say that some of the gags leave the reader straight faced or confused. The first of these, Wits, Fits and Fancies by John Copley is a good example of this. There were supposedly ‘modern’ retellings of classical gags, like the Spartan response to hearing that the Persians had so many arrows that they’d block out the sun, “it’s pleasant to fight in the shade”. My favourite jest was the following, 

       “A gentleman came hungry home and called for dinner, and his man answered that it was now struck  10. “Tut, "said the gentlemen, "tell us thou me of 10 by the clock, being 12 by my stomach?” 

This is funny to me because it describes my Dad perfectly, who’ll start wondering about lunch about ten, and have it so it’s ready to eat at exactly 12.

The next was Armin’s A Nest of Ninnies, which is probably the most ambitious book in this collection. In it, Arnim describes six types of fool, seemingly using real examples. He then uses a woman called World, and a puritan philosopher called Sotto to discuss the lessons that can be learned from each example. Sotto’s readings of the fool’s japes have an almost bestiary vibe. In a bestiary, the learned commentator would take abstracted moral and Christian messaging from the behaviour of animals, in this Sotto does the same to the jests. So, if Jack, the clean fool, accidentally burns his hair off examining an oven, it will be linked to the purifying fires of hell singeing off our iniquities. The character of World gets very fed up with this brittle moralising and leaves Sotto to ruminate by himself.

The first fool Armin introduces is Jack Oates, the flat fool. He lives with a knight called Sir William, whom he calls Willy. He’s what Armin calls a natural fool, causing all kinds of ruckus when he pursues his own single-minded ends but, most importantly to Armin, he doesn’t curb his foolishness when it will help him but is unequivocally himself throughout. 

Jemy Camber, the fat fool is a far more dislikable fellow, being vain, boastful and easy to trick. According to Armin, he was a member of the Scottish court and was mainly used as the victim of tricks, like the one where they blindfolded him and pretended he’d performed an elaborate horsemanship stunt - which he then believed.

Leonard the Lean fool is even more dislikable, very violent, often at ‘fisty-cuffs’ with other people. Jack Oates did get punchy when he thought he was being replaced in Willy’s affection, but Leonard seems like he was more a liability than any kind of fun.

The nest fool, Jack, is probably my favourite of the ones Armin talks about. Whereas many of the anecdotes (and fools) have an air of apocrypha, Armin provides real concrete details about this man. He met him while traveling with the Earl of Chandos’s playing company, the one Armin was part of before joining Shakespeare’s. Interestingly, Armin was not the designated fool of the company, a man known as Grunball was, and Jack loved the theatre company and Grunball in particular. He talks about Jack bursting into the kitchen of the big house while the company were changing there, then accidentally setting fire to his hair. The ridiculousness of the singed hair made the company burst into fits of laughter during the performance and having to abandon it. What’s more, Jack was so excited to chance upon the company that he crossed a very unsteady frozen river to go and chat to them. He sounds like a nice fellow and was, ‘welcomed all places, barred none’.

Armin’s next fool is a famous one, Will Somers, Henry VIII’s favourite fool. He is characterised as a guileless, helpful chap, who often used his privileged position with the king to help people out. It would also appear that he was narcoleptic, falling asleep leaning against a stile. Armin notes that many of the things he said were “for mirth inserted into a stage play”, but is unsure whether they real memories of Somers or memories of the plays.

His last fool is called Christ’s Hospital John, or Blue John (after the characteristic blue tunics still worn by pupils of Christ’s Hospital. His jests were fun enough, another guileless individual devoted to his family and rather inflexible in though. Armin actually wrote a play where he played a version of Blue John, as well as another fool and an angry Welshman. 

A Nest of Ninnies then ends with a Hamlet quote. It certainly seems that some of the figures were true people and some of the stories were true stories, something very different from some of the other books in the collection. It almost seems that Armin was collecting this tales of foolery for his own instruction, as he would play a number of the most famous fools in literature and do a lot to shape our idea of the motley fool.

The next book is called Tarleton’s Jests and is a jest biography of Elizabeth I’d favourite fool. He was a man who become a legend in his own lifetime and a lot of the stories about him are spurious, though adding to the notion of him as a paragon of jesters. Among the legends is the story of how a courtier found him being funny in a port town and introduced him to the Queen, he was born and raised in London and had been a comic actor before he became a household funny man.

Oddly mirroring his story of being ‘found’ is a story about the author if the previous book, Robert Arnim. It tells of how Tarleton saw some funny graffiti and responded to it, only to watch Armin come and extemporise a funny rhymed response. In this story, Tarleton declares that Armin is his successor and will wear his fool’s suit after him. It would seem fools attract origin stories much like messiahs do. Among the jests I enjoyed was one where Tarleton was smoking (or ‘drinking tobacco’) not because there was anything enjoyable about it, but because it was what the cool people were doing.

The next book, Scogin’s Jests, piles a number of very university-based jokes under the fictional name Scogin, who became one of those names jests accumulated around but was never a real person. As someone with an MA, I agree, “A Master of Art, is not worth a fart.”

John Taylor, the Water Poet is represented in this collection with a book called With and Mirth, which he claimed were real jests he’d heard, though they certainly don’t read like genuine extempore wit. The low part of this book was the page of aggravated puns around the subject of bowls. Many of the lesser works in this selection after this work simply stole from it, phrasing and all, and I’m not sure why Zall included them, unless he simply wanted to get the page count up or show how plagiaristic this genre could be. It’s much the same with modern joke books, they all nick the same jokes.

The most interesting of the later books in the collection are the jests of Hugh Peters and James Hind. Peters was a very successful (and serious) preacher, one of the key dissenters who took their congregations over to the Americas, a founder of Harvard University who returned to England to take part in the Civil War and Cromwell’s Commonwealth. He was then hanged, drawn and quartered for his role in calling for Charles I’d death - so, not a natural figure of fun.

However, this jest book, where Peters is painted as a fool and a ‘buffoon preacher’ whose enthusiasm led him to say ridiculous things in the pulpit, ended up cementing his reputation. Some of the jokes are quite funny, especially when he gets carried away with his own preaching. I also liked the Chaucerian first story, where he uses a woman’s secret meal with a lover into a way of being well fed himself.

The last book is about James Hind, an early Highwayman who particularly robbed Roundheads. Despite his probably violence, this jest book creates a prototype of the Highwayman as a fair-minded figure of fun and a general good chap. Here, Hind is very much the kind of person that Richard O’Sullivan played in the Dick Turpin series, robbing rich tightwads with clever tricks and slipping a few coins to serving men and decent people. I liked his Robin Hood style tricks, especially the one where he got a poor curate to defend him from his pursuers by saying they were trying to rob him. I might look at this again if I write a more in-depth piece about the Highwayman legend, it really does seem like a missing link between the reality of the thief and the jollity of the legend. 

In summary, I did find Armin’s the best of these books, shaping his book into something more than a collection of jests, and I preferred the other books that did something similar. I can’t say I cackled with laughter reading this book, humour ages poorly and jokes age worse than that. I’m not sure how, or if, it will help me play the fool in my upcoming production, but there was a thrill to be reading something written by the very man who first played the part I am.

A trip to Horncastle

 Last week, my parents and I took a trip to Horncastle, a small Lincolnshire town,  known as ‘the gateway to the wolds’. Originally a Roman town, a little Roman wall still exists inside the local library. It’s also located on the smallest river in England.

In the eighteenth century, Horncastle was famous for its horse fair, with the phrase ‘Horncastle for horses’ being a common one in the horsey set. The fair was started in 1229 and continued until 1948. They told pit ponies, Lincolnshire Blacks - which became shire horses, and trotters for cabs. The 1839 Grand National winner, Lottery, was bought at the fair and horses could be sold for up to £600.

As a result, the town itself is full of pretty Georgian buildings, many of them former inns and stables. Like a lot of Lincolnshire, it had faded from its glory days, and while many of the buildings are picturesque, many are also a bit shabby. It’s become known as a centre of antique shops, and although I didn’t partake in any antiques, I did enjoy the second-hand book shops on offer, and my parents were very polite to wait for me while I looked around.

We principally went for an exhibition about William Marwood, although we’d missed the larger, temporary exhibition and saw only the smaller permanent one. Marwood was a cobbler a Methodist lay preacher and a hangman. He was the one who developed the ‘long drop’ method of hanging, by creating mathematical tables of heights and weights to determine the best way of snapping a person’s neck while hanging, without popping their head clean off (which did happen at earlier attempts at a long drop). He worked these out by experimenting with flour bags and sheep in the archway of an alleyway. He also created the iconic double trap door, which is often depicted in film and television depictions of hanging that take place long before its invention - looking at you Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Marwood didn’t feel remorse for his actions. He felt he was enacting legal justice in the quickest way, free from the pain and stress of slow strangulation, rather like Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. He also enjoyed the extra money, he got £100 for a hanging, unless he had to hang a batch of people, then it was £100 for the first and £50 for subsequent people. The notoriety also boosted his cobbling business, and the exhibition had a shoe probably made by the hangman.

The Marwood exhibition took place in the Sir Joseph Banks Centre, run by the Joseph Banks Society, another local lad. The local ‘big house’ for Horncastle was Revesby Abbey. It had been a Cistercian Abbey until the dissolution of the monasteries, where it had eventually been bought by Joseph’s grandfather. Banks was rich, and so bought a place on Cook’s Endeavour on the voyage to measure the transit of Venus. He brought back all sorts of plants, naming Botany Bay and setting up Kew Gardens. He became the president of the Royal Society and was a key figure in supporting and linking together key figures in the coming Industrial Revolution. I remember finding him extremely engaging in Richard Holmes’s Age of Wonder. The Centre had a room dedicated to him as well. It’s a neat little museum, staffed by enthusiastic volunteers, which made up for its size. It’s a charming museum, but not a shonky one.

Other Horncastle notables include Henry Lunn, a Methodist preacher (we are in deep Methodist land here) who formed a package trip for some church members, which became the travel agents Lunn Poly, and Edward Harrison, a controversial eighteenth century doctor who developed a system close to chiropractics and has something called ‘Harrison’s groove’ named after him, a symptom of long term asthma. 

Horncastle was also the local town for the Dymokes, the first of which fought alongside Duke William in the Battle of Hastings and became known as the Royal Champion. It was then tradition for a Dymoke to ride on horseback into the coronation feast and demand challengers against the newly crowned monarch. Unfortunately, this tradition was scrapped for Elizabeth II’s coronation, I’d have loved to see it.

I love a big city, world-changing history, but sometimes it’s nice to see the intriguing, smaller stories on the doorstep. I liked Horncastle.

Shakespeare, Voltaire and Johnson

 I’ve recently been cast as Feste in Twelfth Night and that has got me thinking about Shakespeare. While he was highly regarded in his time, his elevation to ‘The Bard’ took about a century. Pepys thought it “a silly play”, but he did see it three times. In the early eighteenth century, while Shakespeare’s dominance was being established, he was the subject of something of a pan-European culture war.

Voltaire was initially delighted by Shakespeare when he came across the plays during his exile to England. He describes them in his Letters Concerning the English Nation as “brilliant monsters’, finding them powerful, strange and affecting. However, on his return to the continent, he becomes more critical. He calls Shakespeare a “drunken savage”, a genius, but a chaotic and clumsy one.

The biggest criticism against Shakespeare was the way he trampled over the classical unities, as described by Aristotle in his Poetics (a book I had to read in my philosophy degree). These unities are unity of action, that the plot must all flow without excessive complications, side plots or characters. A unity of time, that the play shouldn’t take place over a long period, and a unity of place, that a story shouldn’t hop around locations. I remember arguing in a philosophy paper that these unities were born from classical Greek theatrical practice, rather than an inherent properness. An classical Greek play was limited by the number of performers and although the choruses could be elaborately decked out, there wasn’t as many options in the staging to represent different places.

Voltaire also accuses Shakespeare of breaking a non-Aristotelean unity, related to the plot one, a unity of tone. He castigates Shakespeare for putting comic gravediggers, or satirically apocalyptic doormen into tragedies. He feels the noble characters frequently talk like commoners, the kings are not regal enough, the heroes not suitably heroic. It’s probably these tonal inconsistencies that are his biggest criticism.

Twelfth Night conforms to all of Voltaire’s worst expectations. It’s a play where the main plot, the love stories between Viola/Cesario, Olivia and Count Orsino are frequently pushed aside by the comic subplot surrounding Malvolio, one of the most remembered characters from the play. King Charles I noted ‘Malvolio’ next to his copy of Twelfth Night, as that’s what he really remembered from it. The play takes place over three months, as both Sebastian and Viola say that’s how long since the shipwreck. What’s more it takes place in two noble houses and a hideaway outside of town. Our production even shows the shipwreck, with some of it happening on the doomed ship itself.

What’s more, while a comedy, there are significant moments of darkness and melancholy. The Malvolio subplot, not only threatens to overtake the play, but ends with the joke being taken too far and Malvolio genuinely injured by the ‘comic’ revenge done to him. At the end of the play he threatens to have revenge on the other characters and walks off, not to be seen again. We’re early into rehearsing the play and we’ve yet to work out how to reconcile that moment with the triumphant, happy ending we’re aspiring to. 

My own character, Feste, is also a rather melancholy figure, despite being the fool, a figure of fun. He makes jokes, but many of them have a whistling in the dark air to them. From his frequent attempts to hustle money from people, it’s clear that his position is a tenuous one and he ends the play with a satirical song about growing up and becoming disillusioned in a world where, “the rain it raineth every day.” His response to the rain, to say, “hey-ho, the wind and the rain”, to accept it and shrug it off. It’s not exactly a position of success, though it is a relatable one.

Samuel Johnson’s edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare begins with a preface, where he analyses the body of work as a whole. He has his criticisms, that famously “Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault”. Although he does admit that there may possibly be seven in a row. He also quibbles with Shakespeare’s fondness for a pun, comparing puns to will-o’-the-wisps, which lead the traveller off their proper paths. He’s not wrong, Shakespeare will veer all over the place in such of a pun, even a bad one.

As to the unities, Johnson points out how the plots of Shakespeare generally move to a satisfying conclusion. He says that unity of place belittles the audience. If the person watching a play can imagine the theatre they are in is a stand-in for Rome, than it can just as easily become a stand-in for Alexandria later in the same play. “The spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.” If they can make one imaginative leap, they can make another. The same goes for unity of time.

As for Voltaire’s accusations that Shakespeare lacks a unity of tone, Johnson points out that life frequently mixes the humorous and the tragic, the low and the high. What’s more, that mix is an essential part of life, and so Johnson calls Shakespeare “the poet of nature”. His kings and heroes are not kings and heroes but observed people, his tone reflects the jarring tones of everyday life. Johnson argues that this is the source of Shakespeare’s power, that he is not a dry formalist, but a portrayer of life in all of its messy glory.

It’ll be fun to see if we can get some of this messy glory into our production.

 

Review: Old Saint Paul's by William Harrison Ainsworth

 I’ve been fond of William Harrison Ainsworth for a long time but it’s been a while since I last read one. He fits autumn wonderfully, the longer nights lend themselves to his lengthy, melodramatic form of storytelling. There’s also his choice of subject matter; deception, murder and frequently supernatural happenings that hang nicely with the gloomy season.

Old Saint Paul’s has a lot to recommend it, a tale set in London during some of its most gruesome history, 1665-66, plague and fire. With the inevitable addition of crossed love, criminality and other possible nuttiness, I was excited to begin it.

Ainsworth usually knows how to start a story, Jack Shepherd’s race down the Thames during the Great Storm is exciting and Auriol has one of the most balls-to-the-wall crazy and gripping openings involving severed heads, sudden grandfathers and the elixir of life. Old Saint Paul’s is a little more subdued, we are introduced to an upstanding London grocer and his family. His apprentice is in love with his daughter and, if following the Hogarth’s good apprentice progress, expects to marry her at some point. Unfortunately, she is also desired by others and a young rake has been suspiciously injured in their shop and is now in private rooms with her. This looks like it’s going to escalate further but then… plague! The grocer’s son is struck down.

Then….plague! Is a frequent occurrence in this book set during the great 1665 plague outbreak. Not that it’s surprising, but Ainsworth does seem to pull the trick out when he isn’t sure where to go or wants to throw in a moment of surprise and fear. The plague is a strange thing in the book, at times it seems to be instant death, with people noticing it and instantly dying. For others it seems to take longer, or to drive them to mad actions, like swimming the width of the Thames. It’s treated like an instant death sentence but a third of the characters survive a bout of plague, the hero, Leonard Holt, survives it twice.

It’s clear that Ainsworth is borrowing a lot from Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Stories of people going crazy and purposefully infecting as many people as possible come from there, as well as stories about the grass growing in London streets. He says he gets the idea of the grocer barricading his house for months to become a fortress against the disease comes from Due preparations against the plague, both in soul and body. I found this plot line about a family holed up and waiting it out to be one of the most interesting. It’s also very interesting that he wrote this book before the link between plague, rats and fleas was properly known, so the transition of the illness is till described in terms of miasmas and bad air.

One of the influences of Defoe on the book is the character of Judith, the plague nurse. There’s a lot in talk in Journal of the Plague Year about nurses, how the literature at the time castigated them for hastening the end of their patients and stealing their valuables, but Defoe felt they did a good job. Judith is one of these bad nurses, she carries around pustule scrapings on a needle so she can give plague to people who get in her way. She uses the plague to steal and create hordes, which are often stolen from her. Mostly she’s bad because she revels in the plague, as does her accomplice, Chowles the coffin maker. These two have a grizzly ending, killed by a tidal wave of molten lead while hiding in the belly of the cathedral.

I think Ainsworth was trying to do for the old cathedral what Victor Hugo did for the Notre Dame. Both books contain lengthy descriptions of the architecture, using the gothic building to give a gothic air to the stories themselves. The big difference is that Notre Dame in Hugo’s book is a symbol of age and permanence, the machinations of the characters have no impact on the building which stood before the events in the book and will stand long after. Old Saint Paul’s is a structure with a time limit, it doesn’t even survive the events of the book, burnt down by the fire. As such, it’s not a symbol of permanence, but of the old, rotten order to be destroyed and rebuilt anew, the last image being of Wren’s finished building.

I learnt some interesting things about the building. One was of St Faith’s, which was a parish subsumed by the cathedral but held separately in the bowels of the building. Remnants of Saint Faith’s still exist under the current cathedral. Both our criminal and hero characters in the book find themselves retreating into St Faith’s and the crypts beneath. These crypts now have a very pleasant cafe, bookshop and free toilets. Something else I learned was that Saint Pauls also served as an indoor market and meeting place, with items, including food and drink, sold up the nave. I did some elaborate googling to check this, as I know a number of Ainsworth’s inventions have become folk knowledge, but his one was true. What is not true is that the building became a huge plague hospital, that is an Ainsworth invention, but it is a striking image, and fits his picture of Saint Paul’s as a symbol of the sick society that needs to be burnt down for a true godly society to exist.

Much of the book is about this sick society, one in which the rich can prey on the poorer, especially on their women. The rot sets in at the top, with Charles II portrayed as irreverent and lascivious but is most seen in the actions of the Earl of Rochester and Paul Parravicin. The first, a historic character, spends much of the book after the grocer’s daughter, Amabel. His frequent attempts to inveigle his way into her company become almost comic, especially as he frequents increasingly ludicrous disguises, at one point he’s disguised as a man called Gregory Swindlehurst… can we trust a man called that? He’s accompanied by Major Pillichody, a cowardly braggart whose distinctive manner of speech and one eye draws the reader to the disguises, even if the characters are too stupid to notice. Interestingly, one of Rochester’s disguises is as a quack medicine man, something he really did.

The Jeremiah calling on the plague and fire of London is a man called Solomon Eagle, who lives in the upper parts of the cathedral and frequently wears a lit brazier on his head, which made me think of Arthur Brown (from The Crazy World of..). Not only does he prophecy London’s sickness and burning, but he helps start the great fire of London with Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker who confessed to starting it with grenades. During the fire, Charles II grows up and becomes a proper leader to his people and Rochester risks his life to save others, while those who don’t reform (like Judith and Chowles) are burnt away, along with the old, corrupt church.

Old Saint Paul’s is not Ainsworth’s best. The overall theming, the sickness of London and the purifying fire are interesting and there are a few stand out moments, the chapter where a group of people perform a wild Danse Macabre is a striking moment but it’s poorly plotted and the characters are weak. Ainsworth isn’t the best creator of character, and Pillichody is quite funny, Judith and Chowles are boo-hiss evil, but Leonard Holt, the grocer, even the Earl of Rochester are rather dull. What’s more, in the great Ainsworth books he can rely on his great talent for set-pieces and striking visuals to carry the book along, but this just gets muddled. There’s too much back and forward with the Rochester/Amabel/Holt plots, too many people catch the plague and then survive it, there’s too much wandering about. (Naturally ‘the pretty little village of Willesden gets a call out). 

There’s also a plot thread featuring Holt, Paul Parravicin, a mysterious man, a girl called Nissi and a blind piper which isn’t very interesting and relies on a grand secret which is teased and put off so many times it becomes irritating, and then isn’t all that revelatory after all.

Not that I didn’t enjoy this at all, I enjoyed it fine but I’ve read Ainsworth books that reached higher levels and I thought a book set in the time of plague and fire would reach those.  

I Love Shonky Museums

 In the summer, I went to Derby to visit three museums. One was a multi-million pound regeneration of a UNESCO heritage site, another, a local museum and gallery with a special exhibition about the town’s most famous artist, and the third, a house museum that included the UK’s largest toy theatre collection, an exhibition about the Tomb Raider games and a Victorian bathroom the visitors can use at their convenience. The third museum was my favourite, it was also the shonkiest. I love a shonky museum.

My favourite museum, one of my favourite places in the world, is Doctor Johnson’s House. It is a small museum, probably underfunded (at least, I’d like to see it have more money) but it’s not shonky, probably due to the principles established by its founder. So what is shonky museum? It’s a museum with a confused collection that shows residues of past fads in accumulation and presentation.. and I love them.

My Platonic idea of a shonky museum

This imaginary museum is in a medium-sized town, housed in an old library or mid-sized late Victorian building. It may have a small modern addition, probably with toilets and a school visitor’s room. 

It started as a local antiquary society and the original museum was in their meeting place or the house of a leading member. This leading member had an interest in something fairly obscure, say Etruscan pottery, which forms the core of the collection. This has been bulked up over the years by the various donations of other members and often a bunch of stuff the town council had which they didn’t know what to do with. There will be fossils and ammonites, some stuffed animals, items brought back by members in colonial service, some old toys and packaging, a few neolithic axe-heads and maybe a hoard discovered by some local detectorists. There will always be at least one shard of Roman Samian-ware. If the original collector had the funds and contacts, some of the Etruscan pottery may be significant but generally it will be full of the odds and ends found in any local museum. The modern curator will be faintly embarrassed of their collection and squeamish about providence.

In the early days, a person would have needed to book a visit to the collection but some time in 1934 it became available to the general public on weekends and bank holidays. Leading up to the Diamond Jubilee in 1977, it moved to some defunct library or council building where they now open Saturdays and weekdays, except Mondays and Wednesday afternoons. It had a long, cumbersome name but the locals called it something shorter (if not merely, The Museum).

At some point in the early 90s, the museum won a grant from the National Lottery and used it to modernise. They changed the name to something cool and flashy, but the locals kept calling it the name they always had. They invested in a new, immersive, themed part of the building, probably setting up a Victorian kitchen. This allowed them to display all the old packets of things they had laying around, use the old mangle and set up the cast iron cooking range that had been clogging up storage space. They filled it with replica cooking utensils and that plastic food you only ever see in museums. (I’ve been to so many of these places I now recognise the exact types of bread rolls, cabbages and meats, they all seem to be from the same place. They are expensive, a small mediaeval pie costs £35). This food will not be very well maintained, the tastier items will display a child’s bite mark and the drinks will be covered in a layer of grey dust.

They have also installed my favourite item in a shonky museum, a mannequin with a repeating speech track near it. In this case the mannequin has been dressed as a Victorian maid in a mob cap, the costume now looking slightly threadbare and seedy. The voice track is of the woman complaining about all the chores and tasks she has to do, there may also be the sound of servant’s bells. She will have been played by an actor putting on a poor accent, full Eliza Doolittle if near London, Vera Duckworth if near Manchester - you get the idea. The mannequin will be just that, no animatronics or anything and the looped speech track will mean that spending too long in the Victorian kitchen will be unbearable.

Coming up to the millennium, out museum received a grant for the big two-zero-zero-zero. They renamed the museum again, to a shorter version of the original name. The locals still call it what they always have. They updated their explanation cards and signage to make it more visual, but made it less informative. They brought in a small section where children can try on old clothes, top hats and mob-caps but many of these are now a little ripped and tatty. They also installed a number of interactive features, either with screens of mechanical sliding foors or pop ups - most of which no longer work. 

And since then, that’s it, because the new rejuvenation was canceled after the 2008 crash, then there was austerity, then Brexit and councils don’t have the money to spend on nice things anymore.

The council will hire a curator, who may have a number of sites to oversee but most of the day-to-day running will be by volunteers. These will mostly be retired folk, maybe the odd student for a few months. There will be two types of volunteers; the ones who do it to get out the house and talks to people, and the ones who have an obsessive knowledge of the town or some of the items in the collection (that Etruscan pottery again). The volunteers will incessantly snipe and bicker at each other for updating the visitor book wrong or setting out the souvenir pencils incorrectly. However, all the volunteers will be warm and welcoming to visitors and will be a good percentage of the museum’s charm.

I’m not sure I’ve been to anywhere that is all of this, but I’ve been to many that are some of it. I may have been taking the piss a little but I love these places and I hope they keep muddling through for decades to come. 

Review: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

 There was a time when I used to read many books about writing but I lost the urge as I passed my MA in ‘writing’ and quietly plugged away at my writing projects. I’d not heard of Bird by Bird until this year but for some reason, it kept popping up in my attention, the way things do. Then, I was in a charity shop and saw a copy, it seemed like fate.

Structured as a set of seminars, where Anne Lamott tells the reader what she’d tell her students, and also the things she’d like to say to them but probably wouldn’t. The book deals more with the writing life than writing itself, and the writing life as she sees it in particular.

I begins with a pretty typical ‘weird kid becomes writer’ story. Tom Gauld did this brilliant cartoon once where mysterious hooded figures come and take a child from their parents. The parents cry and wail, wishing they hadn’t gone to the library so much. The child declares “I’m a writer now” as they are taken away by the hooded figures. It does feel like that, some people simply get into these book things too hard and they are cursed to be the writers.

It’s in this first section that the first disquieting note arose. She says she loved to hang out with the oddballs. The oddballs are defined as “ethnic people, theatre people, poets, radicals, gays and lesbians”. I could generously interpret the statement to mean that they were different to the kinds of people she knew with her conservative background (and a later tangent on school lunches reveals how limited and conservative this background was) but in light of other comments, it does seem she sees anyone not from this background as strange. Soon after she says how all her stories involved a character meeting “someone like a clown, or a foreigner.”

I think it’s supposed to be a bit of jokey self-deprecation, playing a ‘bit’ on what a poor teacher she is, but she really has no generosity for her students. She mainly portrays them as irritating losers, too hung up on publication and generally rather pathetic. She sighs when they keep asking her about agents, and in some senses I should see why, the writing itself should be more important than the agent, but these are students on a writing course - of course they are interested in how to get an agent. What’s more, for her to dismiss the question about agents has a sour taste when you realise she simply used her dad’s agent and didn’t have to go through the process herself.

There is a good point to made in focussing on the writing not the publication, as there is in telling would-be published writers that publication isn’t the cure-all they are hoping for. There are some other good pieces of advice as well, the titular “bird-by-bird”, which could also be seen as word-by-word. Writing is a series of small decisions and work that lead to a larger whole. I like her insistence on writing at least 300 words a day to keep up a routine. I liked the reminder that plot springs from character, that a writer should trust their intuition and that the pain of perfectionism can be massaged out like a muscle cramp.

To be honest, it’s the reflections on life that made this a pretty unpleasant book. She really leans into the pain of writing and the self doubt. As someone who dreads the moment before I start writing and do all sorts to put that moment off, I understand where she is coming for but Lamott makes it sound like there is almost no part of writing that she enjoys. I actually have a nice time once I get started, it’s the getting started that hurts.

There’s also a lot in the book about jealousy. She condemns Muriel Spark to having “bad things rain down” upon her because she enjoys writing. There’s a whole chapter on jealousy and it’s really ugly. I think she’s trying to overstate her jealousy, create humour by hyperbole, but it’s just horrid. She talks about putting a friendship ‘on sabbatical’ because the friend was successful. It gets really ugly when she says about what got her out of her jealousy, a documentary in AIDS. She decides that if these people can keep going with the ravages of that disease, she can face her jealousy.

Another chapter is about how she does charitable work at an old people’s home and how she learns, shock horror, that the old people are people. True, not proper people, some of them smell of wee and have thinning hair, but something like people. It’s a true revelation to her. Another time she tells a story of a church committee and says that there were 3 African-American women and one white one - the race had nothing to do with the story, why did she need to include that?

I can accept a lot the ugly things she says are her playing a role, doing a ‘bit’, making herself out to be worse than she is but I think there is a real ugliness underneath a lot of it. She says she writes because she enjoys embodying other people, getting into her skin but a lot of her writing (including here) is about her, and a lot of her. There are too many instances where she seems to treat other people like props for it to seem like a coincidence. 

Some of the writing advice is good, some of the life writing engaging but I found this book too ugly to be enjoyable.