“You have done well comrade Pemuvar, production of the P44 was up by 4% last month, one day there will be a statue of you right here in the square. Why don‘t you come to my flat this evening to celebrate, my wife has a beetroot.”
Russians are tough, being one-quarter Russian myself I let the motherland down badly a couple of years ago when I bought a British Anzani Iron Horse. It’s a two-wheeled motorised plough made for smallholders in the 1940s, when smallholders were still expected to walk a few steps behind their ploughs. After the customary hour of fiddling we eventually got the JAP 6 engine to start and I impetuously thought, great, lets plough.
It was an evil piece of machinery with a blind hatred for me, it has a form of skid-steer arrangement for turning, where you lock one or other of it’s two wheels, which, if you’ve ever driven a bulldozer you’ll know how turning can be quite violent if you’re on ground that’s at all sticky. With the Anzani it’s worse because you are walking behind it holding onto handles probably about eight feet from the centre of rotation.
What passes for fun in North Essex isn’t actually always necessarily funny, or in fact, fun at all.
We clattered and wheezed to the point where I had either to turn, or demolish the greenhouse. The revs wouldn’t drop, and as the machine has a centrifugal clutch, there was nothing I could do, and it punched me in the stomach with one of it’s metal handles and threw me aside like a rag-doll as it slewed round, I was doubled up in pain and half-buried in a hawthorn hedge as the brute ploughed it’s lone furrow heading towards my brother’s car, which at least stopped him laughing. I gave the orange monster to him and he took it away that same day. If ever there was a single object to define resistentialism, the malevolence of the inanimate, it was Christine the iron horse. There are a few words that I imagine are never spoken they just live their entire life on paper or worse just in this cyber-ephemereality.
I hate using the words snog or snogging or snogged in fact I can’t use them, it puts in my mind the unlikely and unpleasant vision of hogging snot, another word I can‘t tolerate. The alternative to snog is kiss but that is so mild sometimes, why isn’t there a good word for more passionate lip-nerdling? If you know the Latin for lips you’ll also know why that is a no-go area. However, philema and osculate are technically correct I think. Possibly.
There is a debate, not ferocious in any way, about the three strengths of Roman kissing, the osculum, basium, and suavium, from mild to Sue, and there is some confusion amongst classical references. Ovid, Vergil, Tacitus, Catullus, et al. have differing interpretations of the physical and social potency of these labels but perhaps a simple woodwork blog isn’t the place to delve into the possible misinterpretations of what for themselves at the time may have been a problem area.
Rene Yasenek could have said that, ‘osculating is a means of getting two people so close together that they can't see anything wrong with each other‘, and it would have been okay. But that word holds too many connotations of the osculum infame, a parody of bishop ring-kissing, you may remember the Goat of Mendes offering up his fundament in The Devil Rides Out, and elsewhere, and we probably don’t want to stray into that whole area of paraphilema. I imagine you might be sighing and thinking that to create a neologism by trying to revive an archaism, with the basium of life, is in itself impossible and not what neologism is about at all. Perhaps there isn’t a good alternative for 'kiss', but there certainly is for ‘movie‘, which is just marginally less hateful than ‘snogging‘.
How rarely films are accurately portrayed in real life. The doctor, played by Trevor Howard indulged in ‘violent’ philemi with Celia Johnson publicly on several occasions in Brief Encounter, but they got away with it because for some reason none of Celia’s many friends saw them doing this and then straight away phoned her husband to drop large 1940s hints.
Celia played the part of Laura with such believable inner-turmoil particularly when she was torn between joining Trevor in the borrowed flat or going home to her husband, children and middle-class security. It was implicit that, had they taken things beyond interosculating at that point, it would have meant the end of their respective marriages, leaving them free to be burdened with each other. She did eventually choose to commit to that fate, only thwarted or saved by the waving of the probably compulsory prohibiting-fist of war-time propagandist morality personified by the interrupting flat-lending surgeon. She was brought back abruptly to her dutiful reality.
In Coward’s original short play, he left it unsaid as to what happened in the flat. In 1945, films were for the masses and theatre perhaps for people who were less likely to find a new acceptability in the ‘respectable’ Laura character’s behaviour. The doctor’s dallying, despite having a family, is somehow portrayed as much less controversial or unexpected. It is a great film, perfect music, Coward’s brilliant screenplay and with moments of David Lean genius, letting Celia’s floppy-hair flop over her face for a long close-up when she narrowly avoids doing an Anna Karenina, and the opening scene of a train hurtling through the station must be one of the best of any film.
It would have been more understandable and possibly excusable if Jackie and I had been running out of steam before I crashed us into Sue’s unfeasibly resistant buffers at that epochal birthday party, but things were going surprisingly well, which makes it even more unconscionable. If I was Jackie’s mother I think I would have spilled the treacherous beans the second the door closed behind the last osculated-cheek goodbye, and I guess she did.
There are some people who defy your best efforts at affability, it seemed every time I saw her I left her with a bad impression, before I’d even left. Our introduction should have warned me things were going to turn ugly and stay deeply unattractive between us for the entire length of our parent/boyfriend anomaly. Jackie’s parental driveway was rather narrow and twisting, two basic faults in any driveway but nevertheless full of scenic beauty with a variety of bedding plants providing a riot of colour right up to and along each side. By avoiding her brother’s youthfully-parked moped I may have inadvertently put a wheel near the edge.
“ Mum, this is Nactus.”
“You have just driven over my pansies.”
“Oh God no, really? I am sorry.”
“You drove over mum’s pansies?”
“I don’t know, I don’t think so, maybe a bit. I’ll buy some new ones.”
“There we are, mum, he’ll buy some more.”
“Hmm well, we’ll see, what time will you be in Jacqueline?”
This last comment was directed at her daughter so no need for any sniggering, but in truth I’d fallen awkwardly at the very first hurdle and had to be helped away, from then on I saw motherly disapproval in every wrinkle on her face, and felt her pejorative secateurs twisting in my back every time I turned to leave. Before I turned to leave for the final time, I asked Jackie if a three minute sauvium was so terrible, so unforgivable, that because of it she had to end our relationship. She explained that it was just the tip of the iceberg, and that if I could do that, I could and probably would do anything, and now go away. She used some alternative words that, if anything, made it even clearer.
On a more uplifting note, even at the most Stygian times, there can often be found something good, something redeeming, almost something to be proud of, of all the birthday presents Jackie’s mother received, mine was the best of all, all her suspicions and hostility graphically justified, just beyond her herbaceous border.
4 comments:
You threw it away for the kiss from a stranger what a waste, I to have done this once and we were strong enough to keep our relationship alive, but I would never do it once more. It made us stronger.
I am, as always, delighted to hear of your happy-endings Benoit. I have to rationalise that break-up with the thought that we would never have lasted the test of time, Jackie’s mother eventually would have spiked that dark brown tea, she made me drink, with Pathclear and that, as they say, would have been, without so much as a ’die cheating pansy-killer die’, that. With a stomach-clutching ending narrowly avoided, I am fortunately still here to ponder that particularly deep pot-hole in the middle of memory lane.
Sue's buffers...mmmmm nice.
Right, two things. One, do you think innuendo is ever the appropriate response to someone’s relationship difficulty, well, do you? No, of course it isn’t, and two, or b if you prefer, how do you think Benoit feels when he reads this, he is, I think, what you might call ‘sensitive‘, I’m even reluctant to call him Ben, I’m guessing he’s not impressed at all, as a lot of other people won’t be. I’m not going to say that you’ve besmirched the whole comments area, but you have undoubtedly left a small stain, a very noticeable stain, in an embarrassing place, and everyone has seen it. I’m going to leave it at that, as rubbing away at these things with a chastising sponge can sometimes just make them worse.
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