— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, September 6 1906
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Wicca is the fastest-growing religion in the UK after Islam.

The Dutch term for a sex buddy is ‘seksbuddy’.

George I and his prime minister conversed officially in dog Latin.

Irish 6th-formers know what The Communist Manifesto is called.

Right-wing New York slumlord Fred C. Trump’s middle name was ‘Christ’.

The stranded prawn is in danger of dying out.

Nations Trust Bank is now in Kalutara.

Those whose bunks are in Port Said suffer the worst.

Walter Rothschild opened his first museum when he was 10.

A garbage man is much cheaper to hire than a dirty magistrate.

Plenty of Unitarians were also Utilitarians.

There is no longer room to park a car in Harvard Yard.

Irony don’t care if you’re a fan or not.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, Saturday, November 17 1906
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Podcasts will soon be like porn.

The first three volumes of TS Eliot’s letters have been remaindered.

Confidence travels.

The door is a jar.

Roken is dodelijk.

Humans’ rubbish is the filthiest stuff there is.

The workmen’s compensation court is a small building.

Firemen and violinists have soup for supper.

A pack of veggie snacks weighs the same as one standard British Army rifle round.

Pink isn’t a very good colour for a football shirt.

Turkish dictionaries are half the size of Ottoman ones.

It is possible to commit mass murder and still die peacefully in one’s old age.

For elephants, follow the A4108.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, Monday, July 13 1908
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The human population has almost doubled since we landed on the Moon.

Genital preferences are transphobic.

The third umpire will have the final say on the snatch.

It is against the rules to take a lamb to school.

The market for Argentinian chewing-gum manufacture is very hard to break into.

Greek philosophers were not always as wise as they claimed.

Josef Stalin trusted only one man: Adolf Hitler.

An average sentence in a German newspaper is a sublime and impressive curiosity.

Florence and Bertha aren’t among the top 10,000 girls’ names now.

There is no phone reception in West Sussex.

As many histories as possible should be written.

The going rate for one song at a funeral is approx. £150.

The thing that’s best if you’re feeling glum is coconut water with a little rum.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, Tuesday, October 2 1906
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The moon is up for longer than the sun.

Your antivirus expires in 29 days.

The Dogmata Theologica of Petavius are a work of incredible labour and compass.

The steep limestone walls of a huge rock can make it look, from a distance, like a ship without sails.

Without yin, yang dies on the battlefield.

Eggs are probably not a type of fruit.

Oscar Wilde was pardoned for the crime of homosexuality in 2017.

The laws of Sri Lanka can be bought for Rs74,000.

Russians are the opposite of elephants.

Spitting is prohibited.

The American university is one of the few remaining places in the United States where reflection and study can take place in an almost utopian fashion.

The chief duty of man is service to man.

There’s always a few arseholes.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, Friday, August 17 1906
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In Germany, young ladies have no sex.

‘Silver Billy’ Beldham was blond, and is said to have fathered 39 children.

Thom Yorke’s left eye is made of arse muscle.

The state of Nevada was very nearly called ‘Humboldt’ instead.

Strong fences make good eel traps.

A fairy can still win a wheelbarrow race.

There is no law against declaiming Chinese poetry.

There is no other word for ‘synonym’.

You are no longer safe online.

Edward Said never taught anything about the Middle East.

Xerxes’ plans all miscarried in ships of the sea.

Britain is on track to experience a cauliflower shortage.

People in rich countries can afford to be stupid.
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When it comes to the 6 Nations, in recent years the fixtures guys have done well making sure the final weekend sees the big deciders. Tomorrow’s England-Ireland show-down – on St Patrick’s Day! – should be no exception. The Irish have already won the Championship; but now they hope to win the Triple Crown, and claim the Grand Slam for just the third time since the tournament began.

The English will be out to stop that happening. Ireland thumped the champions last year in the final game, denying them the clean sweep (just as they had in 2001 and again in 2011), and this year England’s quest for a third consecutive 6 Nations championship was brought to an early and embarrassing halt – so a bit of reciprocal spoiling is to be expected. (It’s mutual. An Ulster friend sent round a chart two weeks ago, explaining how the English might yet come last.)

I have a little skin in the game. Or blood, at least. My great-grandfather, James ‘Jim’ Sealy (19 March 1876 – 4 February 1949), played this very fixture back in 1896, and scored a try – on debut.

Reporting on ‘A Splendid and Exciting Game’, the (English) Athletic News lamented how from the off the English ‘had a terribly warm time defending… and the wild, energetic rushes of the Irishmen were too much for the phlegmatic Englishmen.’ Penalties were missed, and Brian Moore would no-doubt be amused to know that ‘scrummaging of a loose and scrambling character was indulged in’. Before half-time, however, ‘the Fates smiled upon their [Irish] efforts… when Lee dashed along to the English line, and handing to Sealy at the right moment, gave that youth the opportunity of scoring a try near the posts.’ The English rallied in the second half, but somehow managed to run their only try into the dead-ball area. And so it was that Ireland won ‘a brilliant victory by the following score: Ireland 2 goals (10 points) – England 1 dropped goal (4 points)’. The ‘Critical Comments’ that followed might be fairly classed as poetry.

Pace yer man at the Athletic News, though, that year the Irish did not crack the Triple Crown. They drew with Scotland, 0-0, two weeks later.

A Dubliner born and bred, and captain of the Dublin University team (1898-99), my father’s granddad on his mother’s side played eight more times for Ireland from 1896 to 1900 (W5, L2, D2), during which time the Irish won outright two of three completed championships (there was some rum business about Welsh ‘professionalism’ in 1897 and ’98…).

As the ‘Grand Slam’ per se did not exist until the French joined, the Triple Crown – for beating all the other Home nations – was the equivalent achievement. Ireland won it, for the second time in five years, in 1899, James Sealy helping to defeat Wales in the last fixture, in front of an uncontrollable 40,000 crowd at Cardiff Arms Park. In the entire course of their tournament the Irish had conceded just a single penalty – the first time one had been awarded for tackling the man without the ball.

In his first year as an international, Sealy also joined the British Lions tour of South Africa (W3, L1), playing alongside eight of his fellow Irishmen, including the ‘psychopathic’ Tom Crean (not the Antarctic explorer) and Robert Johnston, both of whom then chose to remain in the country, as doctors, and both won VCs in the Second Boer War. (Sealy did not stay, but years later sent his daughter Brenda there, to marry my grandfather, Gerald Spence Smyth. And thus, eventually, to me.)

Evidently a man of more than passing sporting talent, aside from prowess on the rugby field (where he’s listed as a ‘forward’, in an era when perhaps they were shaped somewhat differently!), he represented Ireland at hockey, and played golf off a plus-3 handicap. In the summer of 1900 he also played in a 3-day game between Dublin University and ‘Marylebone Cricket Club in Ireland’. (Batting – or not – at No.9, he scored 9* and dnb; no bowling. I like to think he might have been the wicket-keeper.)

Presumably at some point Sealy also did a bit of studying. Hanging up his boots, he went on to be a well-regarded barrister, KC, and judge. In 1930 the London Times contained a nib to the effect that he’d been presented with a pair of white gloves, ‘symbols of the lack of crime in the county’ (or, more accurately, a lack of brutal sentencing). He seems also to have had the standard Irish sense of humour – telling an ex-Legionnaire who had been arrested for pulling a gun on a policeman, ‘I think the air here must be bad for you’ – although the records show at least one counsel ended up in contempt for calling the His (Protestant) Honour ‘the seed and breed of Cromwell’.

Yeats would come round to the family home for tea, as would the first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde. When his first wife, Stella, died, Sealy – known throughout the family as ‘the Da’ – married Hyde’s daughter Una. All parties, sooner or later, had their portraits done by Sarah Purser, a middle-distant cousin.

In 1928 ‘Judge Sealy’ was elected President of the Irish Rugby Football Union. In the playroom where the young me watched 5 Nations matches while my father polished shoes, there is a framed touch-judge’s flag embroidered ‘France v Ireland’. A minor masterpiece of cockerels and shamrocks, we have one side of it, our surviving uncle has the other. My aunt in Perth, Australia, has the blackthorn stick that it was waved from.

James Sealy lived just long enough to see Ireland win their first Grand Slam, in 1948. As for his playing days, it is established family lore (passed on by one John Beckett, cousin of Samuel and Guinness underbrewer) that Sealy did not merely ‘score’ a run-in try against the English, but that he “crossed the line, festooned with Saxons!” This may well be apocryphal; but it reflects, I think, on a more eloquent time, when all players were not simply credited with having made ‘the hard yards’.

—
For The Oldie, in a different edit

— The Nelson Evening Mail, March 14 1907
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Wherever there is a fire that ravages everything in its path, the protea is the first thing to regenerate.

Clive James once voluntarily interviewed the Spice Girls.

Manchester has become ‘Womanchester’.

Cineworld has landed in Weston-super-Mare.

The ‘little people’ have been missing out on the opportunity to turn $250 into a retirement fortune.

Literally no-one knows how household heating works.

They do not, in fact, drink Um Bongo in the Congo. (It’s mostly Coca-Cola out there.)

Bowls commentators call contestants by their first names.

There’s a way to say ‘Sir’ that denotes a deep contempt.

Since becoming President, Donald Trump has been sued over 130 times.

It is impossible to be Oscar Wilde.

Elon Musk, tech entrepreneur, designer, billionaire, and astronaut, is most inspired by Kanye West.

There are currently few patisserie chefs in need of work.
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My relationship with G&S had started early, specifically the argument in Three Men in a Boat over which song Harris is trying to sing (I remain confused to this day). Block-booked family cheap-seats at the ENO fed this enthusiasm through my adolescence, until at secondary school I played the part of Nanki Poo in a local girls’ concert performance of The Mikado (fitting punishment for any teenager who think he’s an heroic tenor). During my A Levels, I sang ‘He who shies’ from Iolanthe with two fellow 6th-formers – at which point I realised I was not a tenor and made us all swap roles before we went on stage.

At Oxford, I found the collegiate choral life a little stultifying, and a turn as Florian in Princess Ida provided one way out.

They were a weird and wonderful bunch, the G&S Society – from the otherworldly to the decidedly worldly. A dapper junior law lecturer rubbed shoulders with a chap who worked behind the counter at the local Barclays. Young ladies with evident social prospects duetted with slightly-less-young ladies on 10-year PhD courses. The Fellow of All Souls who’d performed with the Kazakh National Opera (or somesuch) could routinely be found wolfing down a fry-up in St Giles beside the first-year undergrad who’d turned up once for Cox & Box to turn the pages, in a yellow tracksuit.

Sometimes there was even the odd (‘Tzing! Boom!’) musician.

The OUGSS get through about three shows a year, and so it was with many of these fine folks I found myself performing Iolanthe at the Holywell Music Room, in Michaelmas (that’s autumn) term, 2002.

Gilbert and Sullivan’s fourth consecutive smash hit, premiered simultaneously in the UK and the US in 1882 (the first new show to do this, in an effort to prevent piracy), was also the first production to open at D’Oyly Carte’s purpose-built Savoy Theatre, and the first therefore to be lit entirely by electric lighting.

In every other respect, though, it was a formulaic G&S gig. Iolanthe is a fairy banished from Fairyland for marrying a mortal. She has a son, Strephon – ‘an Arcadian shepherd’ – who is in love with Phyllis, which would be fine except that a) he’s a bit of a fairy himself, and b) Phyllis is a Ward of Chancery, and not only the Lord Chancellor but also every other member of the House of Lords had been rather hoping to marry her himself. Still, everything is going swimmingly until young Strephon is caught embracing his suspiciously attractive mother who, for reasons too theologically complicated to go into here, is eight years younger than him (‘Oh, fie! Our Strephon is a rogue!’). The fairies go to war against the upper house, returning Strephon to Parliament ‘carrying every bill he may wish’ and opening the peerage to – gasp! – ‘competitive examination.’

I was cast as George, Earl of Mountararat (Wikipedia: ‘See also: “Mount Ararat” and “Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act 1907”’), a peer who barely has a line before the second act. (Wikipedia also has the Lord Chancellor down as ‘comic baritone’, where Mountararat is staunchly ‘baritone’. Hear, hear.)

I remember learning my lines in a single late-night bus trip back from London – almost successfully. But that’s about the only thing I do remember. This was a ‘busy’ time for me (‘Faint heart never won fair lady,’ and all that). The flyer in my copy says we did a night in Bletchingdon Church. Well, I suppose it must have happened.

But I do know G&S is not as easy to pull off as one might think. Gilbert’s trademark (and bestselling) socio-political satire – ‘If you ask us distinctly to say / What Party we claim to belong to, / We reply, without doubt or delay, / The Party we’re singing this song to!’ – and panto ribaldry – ‘I heard the minx remark / she’d meet him after dark / inside St James’s Park / and give him one!’ – are often finely balanced. Sullivan’s music, meanwhile, treads a thin line between pastiche (of Wagner, e.g.) and a desperate desire to be taken seriously. (He was going to break it off with Gilbert after Iolanthe, until his finances went down the drain.)

The sorry-not-sorry paeans to duty (as was pointed out in an early West Wing episode, “they’re all about dooty”) and the mock-ponderous ‘Blue blood’ and guardsman’s songs are tricky to get right when you’re a callow 20-something. We laughed too easily at ‘vulgar plebs’ and roared ‘Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes!’ more than was entirely genteel. And while the call-and-response ‘One Latin word, one Greek remark, / And one that’s French!’ is audaciously witty and self-deprecating, I always thought ‘as the ancient Romans said, festina lente’ was just plain bad – at least until I heard of Jacob Rees-Mogg. A lot of Iolanthe now seems glumly prescient for our bull-headed times. ‘When Britain really ruled the waves’ is the perfect piss-take Brexit anthem.

I came back hard in my (positively) finals term, as a snarling Lord High Executioner. And then, of course, we went our ways. The law, academia, journalism, post-modernist French clown school. Phyllis is now a high-flying mathematical analyst. Lord Tolloller experiments with ketamine, while working on a novel about rescue donkeys. Private Willis, the embodiment of stolid manly virtue, is now called Sally.

Another alumna spent the Saturday before last assuring teenagers at a schools’ workshop that ENO had not concocted most of the entendres in their new production. True, director Cal McCrystal has missed no opportunity for smut; but nothing could (or need!) be dirtier than these two lines from the original: ‘Why did five-and-twenty Liberal peers come down to shoot over your grass-plot last autumn? … Why did five-and-twenty Conservative peers come down to fish in your pond?’ As undergraduates, we gave these full attention.

G&S is not admitted as the peak of anybody’s musical ambition, and my G. Schirmer scores have lain untouched for 15 years. Flipping through them now, though, I find with pleased relief that I still chuckle at the cheek of the librettos, and my feet tap ingenuously through the finales.

—
For The Oldie, in a different version

— The Nelson Evening Mail, January 18 1907
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Women leaders are more volatile than men.

The cause of alcoholism is unknown.

They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths.

In Togoloese, ‘fofo’ means ‘revered big brother’.

White people, lacking community, must make do with property.

If extortionate fares are demanded, as they often are, the Ceylonese rickshaw driver should be asked to produce the fare table, which he is bound to carry; though no one is likely, if well served, to object to an advance, by way of a pourboire, on the strictly legal fare.

Elvis Presley’s last words were: “I’m going to the bathroom to read.”

Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way.

The Devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.

In 1928 the Tate Gallery was drenched in mud.

A destitute is someone who will have sex for money.

It is unsafe to have one foot in the world of social media.

There are no heroes without wounds.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, September 4 1906
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There is a whale whose voice is too low to communicate with other whales.

Seatbelts do not statistically improve your chances of surviving a car accident.

London’s Mithraic temple is buried deep beneath the new European headquarters of Bloomberg, the financial information company.

Aeneas and Euclid are both in limbo.

The name Lezard is not a Basque name.

One human male ejaculation contains enough sperm to impregnate every fertile female in the Western world.

All traditions must start somewhere.

Bell’s whisky doesn’t make you want to drink Bell’s whisky

Daniel O’Donnell will go live on Facebook from his show in Branson, MO, today.

We have no choice but to believe in free will.

The administration of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi has charged dozens of Burmese civil-society activists under a law that restricts criticism of the government.

The nation is divided over the John Lewis Christmas ad.

Clichés are piss.
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