Gert’s Xmas quiz

Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering Heights…

Since 2013, The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever has celebrated Kate Bush’s 1978 hit. People dressed in red gather in parks all around the world to dance choreographed steps to her emotional outpouring.

The Gerts of course were well ahead of the trend (as always) in writing about this song in one of their most delightful unpublished works, The Life and Lies of Bella Hatherley.

If you have been reading us for a while you may recall that Pixi, Bella’s mother, went on a spiritual retreat and came home, burdened by Dahabara, her erstwhile guru, who proved very hard to move on.

Read on to see how Bella and her brother Gareth, with the aid of Kate Bush, manage to get her to leave.

One night when she was out in the garden listening to the voices of the spheres I had a wonderful idea. I would make a message telling her to come home, And as soon as I thought that I knew exactly how to do it.

The very next night when Dahabara was going to sleep in the attic she heard a ghostly voice calling to her. She couldn’t hear properly what it was saying, but gradually she could hear ‘Come home,’ in a strange high squeaky voice, then it faded a bit, and then it said, ‘Ooh it gets dark, It gets lonely…’ and again ‘Come home.’

And you know what ? It was me and Gareth up on the roof with his tape recorder playing the Kate Bush song Wuthering Heights. We turned it up and down so it came in waves. When she sang, ‘Ooh it gets dark,’ we turned it up, and when it said ‘Soo cold on the other side’ we turned it up again.

We were balanced very dangerously on the slanting bit of roof with the long cord of the tape recorder plugged into a point in the corridor and with trying not to laugh it was a wonder we didn’t fall down and kill ourselves.We played it for a while. The song was quite long. Four minutes Gareth told me, and we were getting back inside when we heard her come to her window and call out in a booming voice, ‘I’m coming. I’m coming.’…

Soon we heard thumping footsteps coming downstairs, even though it was late and everyone had gone to bed. She knocked on Mummy’s door,

‘Pixi, Pixi, wake up, I must be gone, they’re calling me. The Kindly Forces are calling me home. I must go now. Tell that woman to unscrew my mincer.’

….

Invisible Book

Gert very much enjoyed reading recently a description of Elizabeth Tonnard’s Invisible Book, one of a limited edition of 100, unsigned and costing € 0. The original manuscript was said to be stored in an undisclosed facility, but it is, apparently, no longer there. Here it is on show at the National Library of The Netherlands:

Catts coom mawwin’

Blinky Bill

Office Of Nomenclature Stabilisation

Could Napoleon Bonaparte have torn down and rebuilt a continent if born Alfonse Petit? Could Winston Spencer Churchill have roused the English-speaking world as Ed Brown? Never. Gen. Ulysses Grant! What panache! Had his parents copped out with “Tim” or “Chuck” the Union must have sundered. There would be no bicentennial.

Artistic inspiration

Rhododendron Pie : Margery Sharp

Margery Sharp is best known for her series The Rescuers, witty and delightful tales about heroic mice among whom we find Miss Bianca and Bernard. The books were made into some Disney films, which probably made money for their author, if not doing justice to her subtle and amusing writing. Rhododendron Pie is her first novel, long out of print and written in one month when she was twenty-five.

Teach your chook to surf

Do it yourself

Gert was inspired to read in The Guardian that someone arrested for performing cosmetic surgery without qualifications said, “You can learn anything on YouTube these days.”