The As It Happens Files (12 page)

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.

Honk if you love radio.

C
elebrating 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:

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:

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:

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.

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”:

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 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.