A Pocket Full of Ferrets

Last night I went off-piste to ITV3 and watched a Miss Marple from 2008: A Pocket Full of Rye. Kenneth Cranham got the rye grains in his jacket pocket and blackbirds both in a pie and his desk drawer and Rupert Graves put a clothes peg onto the nose of a corpse, just to keep it more-or-less in the spirit of the nursery rhyme.

Then of course my mind started to wander, and knowing I was safe with Miss Marple solving everything by being incredibly nosey, I remembered a nursery rhyme book in the East Wing with plates in it by the superb Lawson Wood, and searched it out to see if this rhyme was in it. It was, it's above. But then I was brought back to the screen by a fabulously outrageous performance by the unique Ken Campbell playing a dodgy butler. One scene had him lying on his bed declaiming the rhyme with a bottle and cigarette on the go and his blue eyes bulging. This was to be his last performance, and The Guardian judged him to be "one of the most original and unclassifiable talents in the British theatre of the past half-century. A genius at producing shows on a shoestring and honing the improvisational capabilities of the actors who were brave enough to work with him." One of those actors was Sylveste McCoy, who competed against Ken for the role of Doctor Who and won. But they still did shows together where they stuffed ferrets down each others' trousers.

Blackbirds, clothes pegs, pies. And on Tuesday a corner of my curious and utterly delightful extended family gained yet another ferret to add to two others who, I assume, are also frantically trying to find trousers to run up the inside of. The connections didn't stop ferreting around my mind when I also recalled that I had once attended a wedding reception in the old Diorama in Peto Place near Regent's Park and Ken was a fellow guest. When it came to dancing (and I doubtless did my usual pogo-ing to Van Halen's Jump!) he danced across the floor and half way up a wall. Again, and again, and again. I have never seen the like before or since. Right, off to Waitrose to see if they have any blackbirds. Three frozen packs with eight in each perhaps. 

Pledge for the Unmitigated Postcard Box here.

Bottle

Not for the faint hearted, the Hallaton Bottle Kicking. Easter Monday for centuries has seen local (and not so local) lads fall down the fields in a mass of thrashing arms and legs in order to put a bottle (in fact a small wooden keg) over a stream that runs in a deep cleft to the south of the village. This is pagan rivalry, an annual contest of brute force between Hallaton and the neighbouring village of Medbourne, shrouded in ritual and very, very, tribal. It starts with the cutting-up and distribution of a Hare Pie at the church gates, a blessing of be-ribboned bottles on the Butter Cross followed by a bagpiped parade headed-up by a man in green velvet with a Kit William's style hare on a pole. And a girl looking like an Ovaltine Dairy Maid who throws buns at the crowd from a wicker basket. Even more beer is put away, and then everyone troops up Hare Pie Bank to where the 'kicking' begins. What fun. Bloody fun, but amazingly good natured. When I got a bit near the centre of the action a winger, or whatever they're called, barged into me but immediately said "Sorry!". And then there is the additional spectacle (or dare I say attraction) of a secondary army of girls shouting encouragement to boyfriends, husbands and just blokes they fancied who were engaged head down in the heaving throng. And to a feisty girl in there somewhere. All swooning on testosterone like poets on laudanum, these are the camp followers, running with the pack like a baggage train on a battlefield. I walked back to my village across the sunlit fields, thinking myself a dismounted rider returning after the Charge of The Light Brigade, wishing I was at least thirty years younger so I could get in there with everyone else. Maybe next year I'll turn up in a big Michelin Man padded suit, but expect to be tipped-up in a ditch and abandoned, vainly trying to get upright again.