Here we go then!

As can be seen, my broom is at the ready and all I need now is to find my cloak and hat, wand and Flash the Cat (my Familiar-in Chief), load the hamper and set out. Back in the morning. A very good night to you all. Chocks away... Here we go...

Tonight's The Night

Tonight's the night. I have to convene with my Cornish coven at the Equator, in mid-Atlantic at midnight so I shall have to get my broom all shaken up and ready to rustle. It doesn't take long to get there but I am unsure of the principal objective of this year's proceedings. However, we will, as ever, begin with:

"When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning or in rain?

When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

That will be ere the set of sun.

Where the place?

Upon the heath....

Fair is foul and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air."

Twickenham

Twickenham Stadium (also known as ‘Twickers’) is the home of rugby football and is in Middlesex. The Stadium was built on ground formerly used as a cabbage patch and so, sometimes, it is also called ‘Cabbage Patch’. The first game there was on 2nd October 1909 between Harlequins and Richmond. The first international was on 15th January 1910 between England and Wales. Rugby football is supposed to have been invented by a bored schoolboy at Rugby School. A plaque in the school reads:

This stone commemorates the exploit of
William Webb Ellis
Who with a fine disregard for the rules of football
As played in his time
First took the ball in his arms and ran with it
thus originating the distinctive feature of
the rugby game.
AD 1823.

Rugby School is in Warwickshire and was founded in 1567 by the will of Lawrence Sheriff, originally to educate the poor of the area. It is now one of England’s major public schools. Its most famous headmaster was Dr Thomas Arnold (1795-1842) who introduced enlightened reforms in education; emphasizing sport, self-control, reliability, steadfastness and taught the assumption of responsibility which, altogether, proved a combination that has since been adopted in education systems throughout the world. Suggestions for dress to spectate are set out in Chapter 11 of History of Men's Fashion.

Book III: Something of Boss & Co Guns

Boss & Co
Boss & Co can trace its origins to 1773, when William Boss began his apprenticeship in Birmingham. In the late eighteenth century he moved to Joseph Manton’s firm in London and his son Thomas Boss was apprenticed to Manton. When Thomas finished his apprenticeship in 1812, he started his own firm in St James’s Street, where he began making Best Guns only. This policy is still applied, prompting King George VI to say:

“A Boss gun, a Boss gun……bloody beautiful, but too bloody expensive!”

It is true to say that they are still, unashamedly, amongst the most expensive new guns in the world.

A Boss gun was such a favourite with Papa Hemingway that he used one to end it all.

The firm does, by popular demand, also make a more economical model, called the ‘Robertson’, named after John Robertson, who bought the firm in 1891 and devised the Boss single trigger in 1894, the Boss ejector in 1898 and their own over-and-under in 1909.

After a few moves around the West End, the shop and the workshop are now at Kew Bridge. A selection of shots of a fine pair of Boss & Co side-by-side shotguns is shown in the picture, courtesy of Boss & Co.

Wearing formal hats and something more of soft felts

Another excerpt from Book III (coming up):

All formal hats - for example, toppers, cokes and hunt caps - are properly worn to sit more or less straight on the head but, in the case of toppers and cokes, tilted slightly forward - but not at a rakish angle, which might be appropriate to soft felts, panamas and tweed hats and caps. On the subject of soft felt hats: the trilby hat is named after George du Maurier’s late 19th Century novel and play, Trilby; because one of the protagonists, Little Billee, is ‘discovered’ wearing such a hat. The heroine, Trilby O’Ferrall, an artist’s foot model, was mesmerized by the evil, controlling Svengali. George Palmella Busson du Maurier (1834-1896) enjoyed a youthful career as a Bohemian artist in Paris, before he settled in Hampstead, North London. He worked as a cartoonist for Punch and his most famous cartoon was True Humility (1895) above, from which we get the familiar expression ‘a Curate’s egg'.

The caption is:
Bishop: “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr Jones!”
Curate: “Oh, no, My Lord. I assure you! Parts of it are excellent.”

George was the grandfather of the even more successful novelist, Daphne du Maurier.

The higher-crowned, broader-brimmed fedora hat is also named after a fictional character: the heroine of Victorien Sardou’s 1882 play, Fédora.

Blagging for A Doctorate

Overnight I had an interesting offer. Sometime ago, I had signed up to undertake editing work with a particular agency and had had no offers of anything, until this morning. The 'editing' offered was to undertake a doctoral thesis in its totality on a specified subject and to deliver it by April 2011. The fee offered was £2,000. So, for £2,000, prospective Dr X buys a high academic qualification and I am asked to be an accessory to this cheating and, for what it matters, a cheap accessory at that. Looking into the subject of academic cheating assistance, the internet is rife with crooks hiding behind fancy academic-sounding names and openly offering theses and 'model answers' for cash. Why is nothing done about it? Surely, it is a serious threat to the fabric of society? What happens if, say, medical and architectural qualifications come to be 'awarded' on the basis of cheating, by people who are incompetents? It does not bear thinking about. In an age in which small details of daily life are highly (and, arguably, over) regulated, it utterly beggars belief that the prosecuting authorities overlook this tawdry racket and that academia is too limp-wristed to stamp it out. It is bad enough that students no longer have to memorize anything, even the basics of their subject, and are allowed to turn in work that is seldom done in true examination conditions but I suppose that it is all a consequence of there being so many so-called 'universities' and the notion that just about anyone can be a graduate.

A Near Mid-Night Beach Walk

Conscious of my defalcations in entering posts here and, more importantly, out of booze and cigs, I strode the mile or so of beachfront road into Sleepy Hollow Centro last night, at about 11 pm. The bank ATMs were all closed and little else was open. The Village of The Damned came to mind: just big, dead leaves, drifting crisply across the road. Defeated in my main objective and, the moon being around about full, I decided to return along the shoreline. The lights in a rather run-down, seaside kiosk attracted my attention and there, beneath, in the half-light, I saw a Kiplingesque maiden, right out of The Road To Mandalay smoking "a whackin' white cheroot". Not one to intrude upon the smoking habits of others in these illiberal times, I proceeded, in an orderly fashion, along the tideline, enjoying the blown spume and the flung spray of the South Atlantic Ocean, in my own quiet way; still wondering how I would make up the missing days' posts on here; wondering, wondering, wondering: until this moment. There is no picture for this post, as my moble 'phone camera does not work in the gloaming.