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20 Questions with Ian
sam:
This is the second in apparently a very occasional series.
I've never met Ian, perhaps best known to faithful readers as that Ian. Could you first please confirm that you're not a figment of my imagination? I'm sorry about this, it's just procedure.
that ian, risen again:
We may be all figments of each other's imagination, but as far as I understand it, I am indeed that Ian, though I confess some of my more febrile contributions may have been ghostwritten by my surfeited intern, Sophia Langoustine. She is, alas, currently brining olives with Dan Brown in Umbria.
It’s also true that I tutored under Finestre, the Demon of Such Things, and the current CEO of Hell. It’s less of a case of who did she have to kill to get that job, more who she didn’t have to kill. Yes, among the many such things, she is perhaps most famous for the slogan “It’s a HELL of a destination’ back when Hell had to advertise. These days, the demons complain about those damned immigrants, the leveraged buy-out of Heaven by JesusCorp® has taken the shine off a celestial retirement plan. The price of an apartment Styxside would make your eyes water (admittedly so would the smell). Don’t even think about older neighbourhoods like Be'er Shachat or the painfully with it Dress Down Friday unless you’ve got practically a party conference of unlaundered souls to mortgage.
I do share the load of being me with Jess, certainly not the only deceased librarian in South-East London, but definitely the most animated dead librarian in South-East London. She puts in the un in her own personal dead. I don't recommend taking her to a vegetarian restaurant unless you don't like the waiters. Some good library news for her, at least.
sam:
And we're off. (We may revisit Hell.)
My next question concerns earthly delights. Have you made it through the Kama Sutra? Be as detailed as necessary.
click then ignore
--- Quote from: the big W ---the Kama Sutra is neither exclusively nor predominantly a sex manual on sex positions, but rather was written as a guide to the art of living well, the nature of love, finding a life partner, maintaining one's love life, and other aspects pertaining to pleasure-oriented faculties of human life.
--- End quote ---
[close]
that ian, still risen:
Having been brought up a thoroughly English working-class household – we were so English that we didn’t deign to get indoor plumbing till the early 1980s*, a good five years after the rest of Britain – there was no entertaining a book title written in a language foreign. We were some years away from the debut of the town’s first Indian restaurant and tinned pasta in orange sauce was viewed as being something of an exotic food adventure, a culinary Timbuktu. Adults often wouldn’t take the chance, but this was fine fayre for children, for whom Government Authorities had determined Orange as a vital food group essential for growth and development (even if the main side-effect was bouncing off walls and reflecting any and all attempts at education). There was a lot of consumable orange back then as there was little that couldn’t be breaded and frozen into orange perma-suspension (bless you Clarence Birdseye, disappointingly not a fishily fingered seaman) to be reheated in the oven and served with beans or other orange-coloured tinned produce and a side helping of For Mash Get Smash (made by Martians).
It’s quite possible tomatoes were orange in the late 1970s or they were still adjusting the world’s the colour settings after the grand black-and-white to colour switchover in 1973. Orange food was served with orange drinks that didn’t taste of orange, but who knew what an orange tasted like, which was no one given the effort they took. My gran had a pet orange but it had mummified with the rest of the fruit bowl in the early 1950s (the fruit only existed as a status symbol in rationing times; back then you needed two apples and an orange, now you need a £70k SUV to impress visitors). Actual orange juice was a bonafide restaurant starter (that or prawn marie rose with its lettuce perm and underdeveloped brown bread sideburns). Pretend orange juice was as gritty as the canal but generally had less sewage content (in a nostalgic Proustian fug – or possibly cigarette smoke – we were served this concoction on a boat-el in the recently post-Communisted Prague, and ordered seconds – a wish granted with a stern admix of Slavic admiration and condemnation – the glorious fluorescent sludge left a the bottom of the glasses a testament to our childhood’s place in time and history. There was more to the world than orange though, we did have marrowfat peas, to which a few drops of surely-now-banned green food colourant administered during soaking guaranteed a hue abhorrent to nature. Once a year, my grandfather would eat his garden crop of garden peas, safely silvered in bacon fat to ensure the vitamins didn’t get any ideas.
So yes, the Kama Sutra, not just an exotic title, but an exotic content. Like any child equipped with a basal understanding of that, sanity must be protected with the assumption that one’s parents did not do that. Of course, there’s a certain age when a boy does begin to check the house for sexual contraband. Mine was sadly disappointing, but not a friend of mine, who found a venerable copy of the venereal classic, The Joy of Sex, whose pencil-illustrated, censor-dodging drawings cause a few cricked necks and a subsequent fear that any all parental gathering may have been the gateway for constituted swinging. This friend did have more advanced parents in – it turned out – many ways and whose cache of modernity included one of the first held-held video cameras, an arm-straining behemoth that at video tapes in a format lost to time (if I recall, to play them back, they needed a – of course – Betamax tape adaptor. You will remember that they also had The Joy of Sex. I don’t think he ever recovered from the shock of playing one of those videos and finding out just how much joy The Joy of Sex was bringing to his parents. Oh that indeed.
Back to the censor-dodging drawings, they were supplemented – if I recall – with random pictures of Indian temples, presumably to restrain levels of ardour to suitably 1970 levels. The posing and photography from which the drawings were made was, if I remember the article (and the internet doth confirm) done over two hectic days during strike-related power outages, and in the world before colour was invented, so there were challenges other than legal (the infamous Oz Magazine trial echoed, and let’s face it, Rupert the Bear in an explicitly sexual situation is not a sentence anyone expects to write, never mind see). The British establishment did not react lightly to sexually compromised cartoon bears. They may still be the case. In the conjugal spirit of obscenity, I do share the same starting point as DH Lawrence, infamous deployer of the Last Remaining Swear Word To Threaten America!
Innocence wafted through that era like the smell of boiling cabbage on a Sunday morning, where a boy’s sexual thrills came from glances at catalogue lingerie sections and inadvertently finding a discarded magazine in a hedgerow or a toilet and having to figure out the grandest of plans to (a) surreptitiously obtain the profane literature without beginning to effervesce with guilt and (b) get it into the home without detection. This was your mission, if you were boy of a certain age, and if you chose to accept it, knowing something worse than disavowal awaited upon discovery. Still, I was many years old before I discovered Durex wasn’t a male hair care product (which I don’t feel bad about because why else was it sold in the barbers, eh?). The first adult(ish) movie we were invited to watch (again, liberated by friend, from an errant parent’s collection), well, we all turned up with popcorn and snacks. All probably orange.
*For much the 1970s our heat came from a gas fire (a heavy source of sibling rivalry, not to mention carbon monoxide intoxication) and glowing bowls of Ready Brek (which only started to glow – orange! – in earnest after Chernobyl).
sam:
I have a phobia of Rupert the Bear. It's not something I'm proud of, but it feels good to confess here.
On the subject of orange,
everyone can be a mug!
Brew, la?[close]
what would be your advice to a re-elected President Trump?
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