Priceless, Robin - I dig that slippage too, "impunning", "ded bore/dead
boar" etc. Your Hole-in-the road may come to rival De Quincey's
Toad-in-the-hole - "he would stretch, and pore upon the filth that
muddled by". But unfortunately I have forgotten the Frost red nose joke
- in fact, all I can definitely recall of TWTWTW is said Millicent
Martin & a very snidely aggressive interviewer who later became popular
as a rightwing opera fan, was it Norman something? Frost was snide too -
remember that. Somehow I can hear/see Rowan & Martin in more detail.
Hoping for Enlightenment soon
jwalker
Robin Hamilton wrote:
>One thing that used to annoy the hell out of Carol was my talking to holes
>in the ground.
>
>It wasn't (which it was of course) that this behaviour might seem just a
>little odd, or that Carol wasn't perfectly capable of chatting to a bit of
>Florentine roadwork, but she thought the holes in the road I liked to talk
>to were *common*.
>
>She'd stand in the background tapping her foot and muttering under her
>breath, "That bloody hole never even graduated from highschool!"
>
>"Scusi, is the signora impunning my educational background?" whatever
>hole-in-the-road I happened to be chatting to at the time would mutter
>worriedly.
>
>"Don't worry," I'd mutter back, "she's American and like that -- probably
>can't tell you apart."
>
>"Ah, capisco!" the bit of accidental Florentine construction I would be
>talking to at the time would reply, brightening up, and we'd get back to
>discussing the exchange rate of the pound versus the lira or the length of
>prostitutes' skirts (which given their perspective, was something that
>Florentine holes-in-the-ground were something of experts in) -- the usual
>stuff that you discuss with a hole in the ground in Florence.
>
>That wasn't the problem -- the problem was this bloody five hundred year old
>dead bore in the Boboli Gardens.
>
>For Carol, while contemporary holes in the ground were common as shit, a
>five hundred year old dead boar was history.
>
>"Did you ever meet Cosimo dei Medici?" gushed Carol.
>
>"Meet him, my dear?" smirked the ded bore, "I was poisoned by Ficino."
>
>Oh, big deal, given that Cosimo's vertically challenged personal physician's
>default method of curing a client with a hangnail was to poison him, it was
>virtually impossible to walk through Florence in the 1490s and *not* be
>poisoned by Marsilio.
>
>Trying to break into the conversation, I grumbled, "Hey, you ever meet Pico,
>or watch Savonarola or Bruno burn?"
>
>Turning to me (in so far a five hundred year old dead boar in the Bobili
>Gardens can turn), the Dead Boar simply said:
>
> "Fuck off, red nose."
>
>Baffled the hell out of me -- how can a dead five hundred year old
>Florentine whatsit know the punch line of a David Frost's Younger Brother
>Joke which was a spin-off of That Was The Week, That Was (it's over, let it
>go) in black and white Brit TV in the sixties?
>
>Still baffles me.
>
>Maybe he dated Millicent Martin.
>
>
>
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