Cheshire grin
England has experienced that rare thing, a long, hot summer, and the heat and extended hours of sunshine seem to have turned the dial on the behaviour of the locals from quaint and eccentric to strange and disturbing. It’s official: the green and pleasant land is now brown and feral.
A case in point is that of Steve Gough who decided that it would be a tremendous achievement if he could walk the length of Britain from Land’s End to John O’Groats clad only in a pair of boots and a floppy hat. Reports of ‘the naked rambler’ filled the papers for days in August, with witnesses describing him in the fraught language usually reserved for Yeti sightings, until Gough identified himself. His progress has been interrupted by repeated arrests by bemused constabulary.
Continuing with the ‘there’s something out there’ theme, Kent is supposedly being terrorised by wild cats led by the ‘beast of blue bell’, attacking livestock and scaring the bejesus out of the locals. Crop circles were definitely out this year as a result, probably because the spotters—a race unto themselves born, it is rumoured, already clad in a mac with binoculars hanging from their neck—weren’t game enough to get out into the wheat fields for fear of a mauling.
But the weirdness is not only in the countryside. Illusionist David Blaine, who pretends to slice off his ear in public and wanders around with an eye tattooed on the palm of his hand mumbling nonsense in a monotone someone must have told him gave him a sense of mystery but just makes him unintelligible, decided to spend 44 days in a glass case suspended from a crane next to the Thames. He only had water to drink and a lot of nappies. No-one has been able to answer the question: why?
The poms will say they aren’t responsible for Blaine as he’s an American but he was an accountant in Baltimore before he got to the UK.
I think it’s mad cats and Englishman, Mr Coward.
Nirvana on the run
Meanwhile, back in Australia, bike paths early on Sunday morning are usually bereft of naked runners or feral cats. Last Sunday, however, the local path was divided by witches’ hats and decorated by runners lured by the antipodean cuckoo call that harbingers spring: the oxymoronic fun-run. On the runners’
T-shirts was a coloured rectangle, and on this patch a name and a number;