An excited but mercifully clothed No Good Boyo waved The Sunday Times at me in the afternoon.
He'd got round to reading a review of ageing actress Carrie Fisher's new book "Wishful Drinking" - a title designed not only to catch but firmly restrain his attention.
Boyo has admired Ms Fisher's work since being loaned a video tape of "The Return of the Jedi", a children's adventure film in which she sports a brass bikini and chain. As I recall he fast-forwarded to the relevant scene, watched it three times, then wrote Ms Fisher the letter that still has him debarred from entering the United States under his real name.
"Carrie done a course on electroconvulsive therapy, so I'll do the same!" he declared. "It's time I studied a science. I'll see you when I finished. Ciao for now!"
And off he went. As the daughter of an officially-sanctioned mad scientist I could only applaud his enthusiasm.
Intrigued, I flicked through the review of Ms Fisher's book. "Ah, a course of electroconvulsive therapy," I noted, reminding myself to check the back-up generator before retiring for a peaceful night.
9 comments:
I can recommend the electroconvulsive therapy, Mrs B. They had to put Sizewell B on a double shift when they gave me mine, but only under the condition that I didn't write a bloody book about it. (I still might though, 'cos it was such a lark.)
It was a shame that we couldn't meet over Hannukah/Christmas/etc - I was awaiting the call from Mrs Pouncer which never came...
A shame, Gadjo. Your place was empty as the Persians say.
My father conducted a variety of electrical experiments on Greek Catholic clergy in the Czernowitz region in his youth, earning himself the title of Docent from Lemberg University and Archimandrite from a grateful Orthodox Church.
Thank you, Mrs B., I hope that you projected onto that emptynes the Gadjo that you wanted to be there.
He's a good lad your father, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. The Greek Catholic church here in Romania is known as "the intellectual branch of Eastern Orthodoxy", and so was persecuted to the brink of glorious nirvana here as well. Don't you have a total of 4 Orthodox (sic) dominations in Ukraine, though? You must get confused who's turn it is next for martyrdom.
Correct, Gadjo. We have the Moscow Patriarchate, the Kiev Patriarchate, the Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the one my father set up to discredit religion in general.
He tried his best - canonising Catherine the Great, the Breslover Rebbe and Marshal Piłsudski, ordaining Gypsies, making congregants speak Ukrainian with umlauts throughout and proclaiming toast to be the sole permitted festival dish.
All to no avail. At least 20 per cent of the population of Inner Carpathia are still devoted communicants of his Anticephalous Orthodox Church. The pinheads send him trunks of dry bread each Easter.
As you know, Mrs B., we Dilos are Primitive Methodists, but I know these Orthodoxers, I know their culture and I know their traditions, and I have to inform you that it's not dry bread they're giving your father each Easter but a curd that they make from their own mucus. There are different qualities of this product depending upon from which bodily orifice it has been excavated. I do hope for his sake that he has been given the higher quality ones!
Ordaining Gypsies? Against their will or with the inducement of horilka?
Do not fear, Gadjo, all offerings from his callow congregants are donated to orphanages of other denominations. How primitive are Primitive Methodists? Are we talking about stone altars, and a liturgy involving mead and gristle?
Gyppo, it is a law of Ukraine, handed down from Tsarist, Polish and Soviet times, that Romanies are not permitted to do anything without undue pressure from without.
Orphans of all denominations and none will glad of it, Mrs Boyo - it's all gristle to the mill for them. We PMs are exceptionally primitive, hearkening back to first principles where all there existed in the universe was Lurve.
Before there was love there was dust, Gadjo. Any housewife can tell you that.
"Gristle to the Mill" (Farsz do Mlynky) is the title of the only novel by the 19th-century Ruthenian writer and piemaker Petro Durnczyn.
There is an annual competition for schoolchildren to try to read it. No one has ever managed to do so, even though the prize is the right to desecrate the author's grave.
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