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  ML: Apart from the Spaniard who bought all the things at Sotheby’s, I’d heard that there was another claimant to the throne.

  RR: In fact, there are nine claimants to the throne, all of them totally spurious, of course.

  ML: Naturally. Who are they?

  RR: Mostly English, and they’ve never been to Redonda. But the second king was a poet called Gosworth, who was a real rascal. He had his throne in a pub in Soho, in London, and whenever he ran short of the price of a glass of Burgundy, he’d flog a title.

  ML: Uh-oh.

  RR: So there are more dukes from that era than there are in the British College of Heralds. He apparently sold the throne five times.

  ML: Oh, how awkward.

  RR: Yeah. I mean, don’t buy a used car from him.

  ML: No. Is there a national broadcasting company on Redonda yet?

  RR: Not yet, although that’s been proposed.

  ML: Well, you certainly should have a broadcasting company.

  RR: Right. You would like to run it, I suppose. Are you unhappy in your job?

  ML: No, not in the least, but we could have our meetings there—in February.

  RR: I must tell you, it’s not very hospitable, though.

  King Robert didn’t sound overly enthusiastic about our coming down to set up a radio station on Redonda, so we didn’t pursue it. Speaking of pubs, though, we once talked to a chap who married a pub. Thomas Sisson spent so much time at his local watering hole that his wife told him he might as well marry it—and he did.

  Lyndon Yorke of Marlow Bottom is a tad eccentric in his modes of travel. He once drove a Model A Ford from New Zealand to England—130,000 miles without shock absorbers—and in nice weather, he likes to pedal a sort of Bath chair/boat up and down the Thames. In October 2001, when we spoke to him, he had just shown up on a list of the Most Eccentric People in England, so I asked him what he thought about the others on the list.

  “There are a lot of nuts out there,” he told me.

  Among the so-called nuts were a collector of British mailboxes, a chicken whisperer, a snail racer, the gnome sanctuary lady I mentioned in Chapter 3, Captain Cutlass and Captain Beany. The Most Eccentric list was a goldmine for us, and we proceeded to talk to as many of the award winners as we could. This way we learned, for example, that Captain Cutlass, a pirate, lives aboard a galleon—“a fishing boat to some”—from which he sponsors an annual plank-walking contest. Entries are judged, he told us, on their dress, their piratese, the size of the splashes they make when they go into the water and their screams. He didn’t see this as especially eccentric.

  “All I can say is that I got an award for being myself.”

  Captain Beany did admit to being “very, very slightly touched” when we talked to him about his beany-ness. It all started, he explained, when he was lying in a bath of baked beans (as one does) and the thought came to him, I want to make a mark for myself in the world. So he took to dressing up like a giant bean and running marathons for charity—a sort of Baked Bean Crusader for the benefit (bean-a-fit?) of mankind.

  Ann Atkins didn’t seem to mind being counted among the Most Eccentric. As founder and keeper of the gnome sanctuary in Abbots Bickington, she had, at last count, over two thousand garden gnomes in her care—gnomes that she had collected, restored and preserved, or sometimes created from scratch. She even claims to turn her visitors into gnomes.

  “You’re somebody different, aren’t you, when you’re a gnome,” she observed.

  Couldn’t argue with that. And what did she think of the company she was keeping (Captain Cutlass et al.)?

  “I didn’t think any of them was particularly eccentric,” she said.

  Earlier, I mentioned the couple who moved more than four hundred kilometres across England in search of their lost puppy. There was also a family who moved to the remote Isle of Muck after winning a competition for a house there. But we also talked to a British family who pulled up stakes and moved to Spain when their soccer hero, David Beckham, went to play for Real Madrid. I wonder if they’ve now found a place in Los Angeles.

  Perhaps eccentricity is what you’re left with when you don’t rule the world anymore but your sense of adventure remains undiminished, along with your sense of entitlement and a dollop of individual courage. Ranulph Fiennes—Sir Ranulph, actually—raises money for charity by doing things like running seven marathons on six continents in seven days. He did this in 2003 just four months after he’d had heart bypass surgery, and he managed it without once having to use the defibrillator he took along with him, even though in the Falklands he had to run through a minefield, and in Singapore, his running partner (a doctor) got quite ill.

  If these adventurous strains have persisted in the British character for hundreds of years, what should dissuade a mere octogenarian from jumping out of a plane for the first time? Georgie Sinclair of Aberdeen, Scotland, didn’t foresee any problems. After all, she quite enjoyed ballooning and flying in micro-light airplanes. And of course, she wouldn’t be alone; she’d be harnessed to someone who knew what he was doing … surely. His instructions about how she should hit the ground were very clear:

  “Slide on your bum,” he told Georgie.

  What neither of them had foreseen was how hard it might be for an 81-year-old lady to keep her legs high in the air while plummeting downward. Georgie’s right leg hit the ground first, and she broke her ankle. Probably wouldn’t jump again, she admitted, but when her cast came off, she wouldn’t mind going for another spin in that micro-light.

  Just as well Mrs. Sinclair wasn’t wearing an ironing board when she went skyward, which is how Peter Sergeant of Derbyshire went flying one day. That is, he fixed his ironing board to a glider and went up two and a half thousand feet to do his housework. Extreme ironing, he dubbed it. But it wasn’t so amazing, really—the iron wasn’t plugged in.

  The Bear Suit Man aside—and King Robert of Redonda, who was born in Canada—we didn’t come across a lot of Canadian eccentrics while I was doing As It Happens. Perhaps living in Canada is eccentric enough all by itself, especially in February. But an encounter with a slightly eccentric Scotsman led us to an ex-Canadian eccentric (as in ex-parrot, deceased)—a man known in his day as the “Cheese Poet.” Stay tuned.

  NINE

  Verse and Worse

  Honk if you love radio.

  Celebrating the worst of something was always one of our missions at As It Happens. According to the people of Dundee, Scotland, the World’s Worst Poet was one of their own. Here’s a sample of his work:

  Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay

  Alas! I am very sorry to say

  That ninety lives have been taken away

  On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

  Which will be remembered for a very long time.

  We heard about William Topaz McGonagall from Mervyn Rolfe of the McGonagall Appreciation Society, when he came on the radio to tell us about a plaque they were unveiling in honour of their favourite son. It was to go in the ground beside the “silv’ry Tay” and would be inscribed with the opening words of the poem that was mainly responsible for propelling McGonagall to stardom. The event he was writing about was the collapse, in December 1879, of the River Tay bridge.

  Mr. Rolfe gave us several more examples of the art that has brought Mr. McGonagall such enduring fame, like the verse he composed on the death of the Earl of Dalhousie. It begins:

  Alas! Lord and Lady Dalhousie are dead, and buried at last,

  Which causes many people to feel a little downcast;

  And both lie side by side in one grave, But I hope God in His Goodness their souls will save.

  William McGonagall had hoped that his poetic muse might recommend him for the position of British Poet Laureate, and he went so far as to walk to Balmoral Castle in an attempt to make his case directly to the Queen, but he was not successful. Still, Mr. Rolfe told us, as the world has decried McGonagall’s poetry for more than a hundred years now,
why not build a memorial to him?

  It wasn’t as though the Scottish bard had gone totally unrecognized until then. The City of Dundee had already instituted an annual dinner in McGonagall’s honour. On this happy occasion, the main thing is to do everything backwards. They start with dessert and wind up with the hors d’oeuvres, listening to the welcome address as they exit. No doubt you’ve heard a few welcome addresses that made you want to exit right away, so you’ll probably agree that this was a good innovation.

  The Wikipedia folk, by the way, tell us that Mr. McGonagall also fancied himself an actor but that the theatre where he worked would let him perform the title role in Macbeth only if he paid for the privilege in advance. Apparently, his Macbeth refused to die at the end. They also note that J.K. Rowling named her character Minerva McGonagall after William. Since it’s Wikipedia, I’ve no idea whether any of this is true, but if you know J.K., you could ask her.

  The interview about William McGonagall naturally prompted our listeners to put forward their own candidates for the title of Worst Poet. One caller, for example, read to us from the work of Theophile Marzials, another 19th-century British poet and a librarian. It went something like this:

  Death!

  Plop.

  The barges down in the river flop.

  Flop, plop,

  Above, beneath,

  From the slimy branches the grey drips drop

  To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop …

  And my head shrieks—Stop!

  And my heart shrieks—Die.

  There was more—but my head shrieks Stop!

  And here’s where our Canadian Cheese Poet comes in, because another listener insisted that the World’s Worst Poet title rightly belonged to James McIntyre, a furniture maker from Ingersoll, Ontario, who had a thing for big cheeses. Since we at As It Happens were also partial to big cheeses, Barbara did not have to be coaxed to recite McIntyre’s “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing over 7,000 Pounds” for our pleasure.

  We have seen the Queen of cheese,

  Laying quietly at your ease,

  Gently fanned by evening breeze—

  Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

  All gaily dressed soon you’ll go

  To the great Provincial Show,

  To be admired by many a beau

  In the city of Toronto.

  Cows numerous as a swarm of bees,

  Or as the leaves upon the trees,

  It did require to make thee please,

  And stand unrivalled, Queen of Cheese.

  May you not receive a scar as

  We have heard that Mr. Harris

  Intends to send you off as far as

  The great world’s show at Paris.

  Of the youth beware of these

  For some of them might rudely squeeze

  And bite your cheek, then songs or glees

  We could not sing, oh! queen of cheese.

  Wert thou suspended from balloon,

  You’d cast a shade even at noon,

  Folks would think it was the moon

  About to fall and crush them soon.

  Some people, on reading this, might be reminded of Sarah Binks, the “sweet songstress of Saskatchewan,” but I feel that McIntyre—who, like William McGonagall, was bred in Scotland—is closer to McGonagall in his sense of rhythm and his attraction to dark themes. Note how his “Ode on a Mammoth Cheese” starts out as a tribute, but then you have those swarms of bees, scars, rude youth biting its cheek and, of course, the image of folks being crushed to death by the mammoth cheese as it falls from the balloon.

  But I ask you: is this not championship material?

  Incidentally, if you can’t get enough of bad poetry, there’s a helpful little book put together by Kathryn and Ross Petras called Very Bad Poetry (Vintage Press, 1997), which is where I found the full text of Theophile Marzials’ poem (“Death! Plop …”), and now there’s a website by the same name where you can sample the work of some of today’s worst poets, submitted, apparently, by the poets themselves. This one’s called “Underground”:

  Under water grottos, caverns

  Filled with apes

  That eat figs.

  Stepping on the figs

  That the apes

  Eat, they crunch.

  The apes howl, bare

  Their fangs, dance,

  Tumble in the

  Rushing water,

  Musty, wet pelts

  Glistening in the blue.

  You may be surprised to learn, as I was, that the man who penned this little gem is Barack Obama. Yes, the very one—there’s a picture of him and everything! I know, I know, it’s the Internet, and I had my doubts at first. But then I came across this passage in Obama’s book Dreams from My Father, which certainly was written by him, where he’s describing his move to New York City and Columbia University, and the effect the move had on him:

  I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and writing very bad poetry [stress mine].

  I rest my case.

  When it comes to poetry, good and bad, the members of our audience are no slouches, and for some reason, haiku in particular set people to sharpening their pencils. For anyone not familiar with haiku, it’s a form of Japanese verse, usually 17 syllables long, usually broken into three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables, respectively. When we offered people an excuse to compose haiku on an automotive theme—well, it just made their day, and ours.

  It all started when Aaron Naparstek got tired of the noise outside his apartment in Brooklyn, New York.

  ML: Mr. Naparstek, when did you decide you’d had enough of honking in the neighbourhood?

  AN: Well, it was right before Christmastime of this year. I’d just started working out of my house and was spending a lot more time at home during the day than I had in the past. And also, you know, Christmastime in New York, things get really hectic. Specifically, there was this one—there’s always been a lot of honking on this corner that I live on that I’ve just sort of had to deal with—

  ML: Why was it so bad that day?

  AN: You know, I’ve actually studied the honking problem on my corner in some detail, and it has a lot to do with the way the lights are timed, and it also has a lot to do with the fact that they’re selling Christmas trees a block north of my house and it creates a lot of extra congestion—and people were just going nuts!

  ML: Cars get stuck and they start leaning on their horn.

  AN: Exactly, exactly. And there was this one guy and he was right in front of my window. I live in this little block—it’s generally called “Brownstone Brooklyn,” little three-storey brownstone apartment houses—really beautiful block, but what it does is it creates this canyon sort of echo effect, this river of raging honking flowing right in front of our house, and this one guy was just leaning on the horn, just non-stop—not like a toot-toot, toot-toot-toot, please move kind of thing, but just a BAAAAAAHHHHHN!!! BAAAHHHN!!! Non-stop, nonstop leaning on the horn.

  ML: So what did you do?

  AN: So basically, this guy is leaning on the horn right in front of my window. I’ve got him in my sights. I decided that if he was still leaning on his horn by the time I got back from the refrigerator with a carton of eggs, then he was going to get some eggs on his windshield. And I was really set on it, too. I mean, it was kind of insane. I was very focused. It was like, keep-leaning-on-horn equals eggs-on-windshield. So I got back to the window with the eggs, and I even have double windows—I’ve got storm windows because of all the honking—so I opened the first window and I opened the second window and he’s still down there—BAAAAHHHHHN!!!—just leaning on the horn—and I chucked the first egg.

  It wasn’t very accurate: it hit the back of his car. Then I took the second egg and hit the top of his car. And it’s like, no, I want windshield … and by the time the third egg did hit his windshi
eld, he was getting out of his car and he saw me, you know, leaning out the window, throwing eggs at him—and he just went insane. He went ballistic. He’s screaming at me, he’s saying, “I’m going to come back tonight, I’m gonna kill you! I know where you live.”

  ML: Oh dear.

  AN: He did! He knew where I lived! I was leaning out my window. People started blasting their horns at him, and he’s still ranting in the middle of the street and he finally drives off. I got his licence plate and everything and it’s like, okay, if he kills me, I have the licence plate.

  ML: You’ll leave a note for the police.

  AN: Lot of good that’s going to do me. But basically, it was at that moment that I decided, Okay, throwing eggs at the honkers is not the right response. Like, that did not work.

  ML: No. This is when you decided on poetry as a solution?

  AN: Exactly. I decided that I needed a different approach, and I sat down and started writing these little haiku poems about honking—I called them honku. And at first, that was it. I was just writing these little poems and I didn’t really have any big plans for them. And a few weeks later, like in the second or third week of January, I printed up 50 honkus—the same poem 50 times—and I went out and posted it on lampposts throughout the neighbourhood.

  ML: What did it say?

  AN: It said:

  You from New Jersey

  honking in front of my house

  in your SUV.

  ML: Complete the sentence. Right. They’re all from New Jersey, of course.

  AN: Actually, they’re mostly not. That first honku was very specifically aimed at rallying support in the neighbourhood against two easy targets—people from New Jersey and SUVs.

  ML: Right.

  AN: A little bit of a cheap shot, but I thought, Okay, I want to rally support here, so I went after two easy ones.