Or just twisted geniuses?

In the mid 1990s, an advertising fairytale began. This is a tale of slick corporate marketing which began with – to paraphrase a holy Roman emperor – “too many words”. It is close to my heart because I, too, use too many words. And if this can happen to them, why, maybe, just maybe, it can happen to other verbose self-publishers.

Of course, they had cash to start with. And, to boot, it all happened in Germany, whose sense of dry irony is much underappreciated.

It all began in Der Spiegel, that well-beloved Hanover creation, a weekly news magazine with a circulation of more than one million. One day readers opened its pages to see a strange advert indeed; one which, by its creator’s own admission, broke all the rules.

It was an advertisment by an obscure company which made door handles. The company was called FSB, and the advertisment looked like this:

Picture from FSB.de

They called them Handle Stories. A black and white picture of a door handle, backed up with 200 or so words. Eye-catching? Seductive?

In Germany, yes. The ads ran for 24 weeks and then they stopped. And readers scoured the pages for them and when there were no handles to be found, they protested to the publications which carried them to ask, when would the handle stories be back?

How could the Art Director’s Club of Germany – the top organisation in the advertising trade -ignore what was going on? In March 1998, the CEO of the little handle company was invited to its awards ceremony. Jürgen W. Braun had smuggled in one of his handles. On accepting the award, he held the door handle high and invited the entire hall to stand in reverence.

Handles had arrived.

In 1999 the company published their 100 best Handle stories in a bound volume. It sold out, as did a second volume. And Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – another of Germany’s foremost newspapers – dubbed the company “publishers with a sideline in manufacturing door handles.”

These days, the FSB advertising campaigns are a mite more pictorial. But they still bring the humble handle in from the cold, celebrating the mundane with infectious wit.

Take a look here. There was the 58-instalment handle comic:

Or the campaign where Tomi Ungerer designed new purposes entirely for FSB’s handles:

And my favourite:Sarah Illenburger’s Evolutionary Achievements For The Hand series.

It’s advertising. It’s corporate. I should not be fascinated. But when something so mundane is made into something iconic: well, you have to sit up and take notice.

Don’t you?

Written in response to Side View’s weekend challenge, handles, which you can find here.

No-one can pinpoint exactly, to the hour, when the Queen came to the Hampshire house.

But she did. They’ve had a handwriting expert in to examine her letter and everything. It’s just that her schedules do not show when this serendipitous visit occurred. It happened at the last minute, it seems.

The letter reads,

June 23, 1972

Windsor Castle

Dear Mr Dutton,

It was such a delightful and unexpected pleasure to pay you a visit last week, and I greatly enjoyed seeing the lovely garden, and your beautiful house so full of treasures. One does not often see a garden so well placed, with sudden exquisite views to thrill one, and my own garden looked a positive jungle after your green walks and splendid clumps of shrubs and roses!

With my warm thanks for your kindness and hospitality, I am, yours very sincerely,

                                                                            Elizabeth R.

I’ve never seen a real letter from the real queen before. I’ve seen acknowledgements from her lady in waiting, but nothing as warm and frank and beautifully written as this. But perhaps I do not move in the right circles.

Ralph Stawell Dutton, however, moved in exactly the right circles.

The eighth, and last, Baron Sherborne had consummate taste. He took an old house and garden – Hinton Ampner in Alresford- and made it a little piece of perfection: built in 1790, remodelled in 1867, Dutton took the shell and created what he saw as the spirit of grace and beauty: a Georgian country house. In 1960 a fire raveaged one end of the house and his extensive library. But it did not defeat the Baron; he simply called in the best architects money could buy and remodeled in true Georgian style all over again, buying old books to fill the house.

Filled with things Georgian, it was nevertheless a house which boasted all the modern conveniences: state-of the art bathrooms, telephones in all the right places, heating and plush, deep carpets. A house fit for a queen indeed.

My friend Lydia and I had come ghost hunting. The last house, the Tudor one, had been knocked down after horrific tales of murdered babies and monstrous hauntings, servants who would not stay put, dark spectres and disembodied voices.

And yet as we ambled over the site of the old place we could feel nothing but harmony. For it was such a very beautiful garden. It was theatrical.Everywhere you looked there was a frame, a vista, symmetry.

There was one place inside where Lydia felt something. I asked the room guide, whose room was this? Ah, the guide replied, this was Ralph Dutton’s room. A lovely light place with a huge accompanying bathroom. It is said the toilet was placed beside a window which had ‘ the best view in the house.’

He never married. He lived there, partied there, grew old there and died falling down its elegant stairs, before life could become cumbersome. And he created a house which could delight a queen.

The man had enduring style.

Image from yoyowall.com

My town is exercising a little horticultural shabby chic.

Ordinarily it is packed with showy beds which adorn every railing and traffic roundabout. The Victorian park-fodder of geraniums, pansies, busy lizzies and similar blousy blooms are usually a common sight and the whole place became reminiscent of some lovely brash cockney barmaid who has put on just a bit too much scent.

This year, though, all that has changed.

Where once there were flowers, now there is meadow with long stemmed wild grasses swaying in the backdrafts of the passing traffic. Each meadow has a large sign stuck into it, reading “Blooming Biodiversity”.

It has a certain grace, and I have no doubt our local wildlife will benefit immeasurably. It is tasteless and eco-unfriendly of me to want the bright red geraniums back. But I do miss the slightly overpowering barmaid just a little.

Wild flowers are extremely de rigeur right now: and not just here in Britain. As I was surfing the blogstream, wind in my hair, I lighted upon a post by Terence Corcoran of Canada’s Financial Post.

He writes about the humble dandelion, which is tearing across Canada, epidemic-like, confounding by-laws,and winning the hearts of many.

Canadian city Calgary used to slap fines on those who let dandelions grow on their lawns. But no longer. As long as the flowers are shorter than 15cm, they will not be considered offensive, the authorities have told residents.

Pesticide bans in many areas have meant a spread of the assertive bright yellow flower; and many argue that not only is it essentially harmless but it is edible: a resource for our future.

Mr Corcoran does not like the flower, and nor, I confess, do I. But he accords it a very important label indeed: he calls it The Official Flower of Statism.

Gracious.

The dandelions, he says, are growing because of the state-wide bans on pesticides which were a knee-jerk reaction to a law suit over dandelion pesticides which has since been settled out of court.

The original fears over health risks appear to have been groundless. But still the pesticide ban remains. Ergo, says Mr Corcoran, we all have to put up with these insufferable weeds simply because the state has backed them.

Oooh. The dandelion is a flower of statism. I never even knew statism existed until today. Could it be an example of another word I found today?

An ideograph is an idea, but not just any idea.

It is usually a hotwire, emotive word. It expresses a great big ideology, but when you actually start to think about what it means, its meaning has a nasty habit of running through your fingers like so much sand.

For example: liberty. This is something politicians bang on about all the time. But it can mean all things to all men. Pinning it down to specifics is like trying to stuff a live eel into a jar and keep it there.

But it is a crowd stirrer: think of ‘justice’. It is as if our brains pounce on the word and its many weighty connotations, and accord its user special powers.

Michael Calvin McGhee, an American scholar, coined the phrase. He pointed out that President Nixon used ‘the principle of confidentiality’ as if it were a talisman against Congress during the Watergate investigation, defending his decision not to turn over vital documents.

That principle of confidentiality, my friends, is an ideograph. A captivating idea which might sway millions; which seems to carry a moral weight equal to law; and yet, when someone probes it further it can disappear in a puff of insubstantiality and fell a president.

And it occurs to me, someone is trying to fell the humble dandelion with one too.

A repost: because everyone should know about ideographs.

We have a routine, the dog and I. It suits us.

My daughter wakes at six and is out of the door by seven. And then Felix is propped up with a mug of cocoa and I potter off into the forest to afford the dog his toilet.

The dog’s visit to his spacious forest bathroom is very important. It is with this that he sets the pattern of his day. If his needs are taken care of in good time, before, say, eight in the morning, then lo: the rest of the day falls into place. One returns after half an hour of forest exploratory work to a bowl of crunchy dog chow and a large vat of water; and after one’s repast and once one has seen the humans off the premises to their busy day, one can settle down for a nice long nap.

Without the correct duration and location for one’s ablutions, one may start to feel cheated. So much so that one might protest in most unacceptable ways. One might steal human chow, or distribute it far and wide; or there are darker, dirtier protests which dare not speak their name.

But there is no need for those murky measures in British Summertime.Macaulay and I crossed the road into the forest as usual, and it became quickly evident that he was in devilish form. On several occasions he disappeared completely for minutes at a time and returned with that shifty, muffle-moustached demeanour. When he is like that he will not look me in the eyes. His secret life has all but taken over, and it is all he can do to come back at all.

We returned home to the waiting doggie chow and went our separate ways.

Breakfast: and Felix walked into the kitchen. Immediately, his nose wrinkled up and he began making exclamations of theatrical-little-boy dismay. “I can’t stay in here,” he informed me breathlessly.

“Why not?” I asked, nonplussed.

“Because of that smell. It smells – ” he searched for the right world as a wine taster must – “like a farm, but a really bad one.”

A really bad farm. My olfactory memory skimmed the really bad farms I have smelt in my day. Not a good thing to do before eating. I winced, and began addressing the kitchen sink with neat bleach, and later the bathroom next door. I doused the surfaces with lemon, and forbade my son to leave because if he did, he would never get a square meal before school.

Felix recoiled his way through breakfast as fast as he could and gabbled at the end:” May I get down from the table, please?”

I nodded grimly.

Upstairs, and to the mirror for renovation. I called Felix, who generally reads his book as I get ready for work. Just William was brought in accordingly and Felix sat down on the sofa to read.

And his face crumpled up. “It’s the smell again!” he said.

“But that was in the kitchen! I exclaimed, exasperated, and he agreed. “I know! “he squeaked; “it’s following me around!”

And then, light dawned. Yes, it was indeed following Felix around. Next to him on the sofa lay Macaulay. And with supreme effort, in the name of hard evidence, Felix took a long draught of the air adjacent to the dog.

The dog smelt almost exactly like a bad farm. And he was proud of it.

Which made it all the more perplexing when his humans bawled him off that comfy sofa, dragooned him out of the bedroom and shut the door, firmly between his air and theirs.

Picture Source: The Telegraph

Spaceport. Cosmodrome. Be still my beating heart.

We do not hear as much as once we did about space exploration. Yet high in the heavens above us Russians and Americans co-operate in a common spirit of exploration. And somewhere on Mars a small robot has just drilled another hole in the planet’s rock. Hubble peers through space, and has found dead stars with planet-dust whirling about them; Cassini gazes out at hurricanes on Saturn, and the Kepler unmanned spacecraft took itself into safe mode for an unknown reason.

That’s the News from NASA. But there’s another cosmodrome, another gateway to the stars: Baikonur, on the desert steppe of Kazakhstan: the world’s first space launch facility. the world’s largest space launch facility. Sputnik 1 took off there; Yuri Gagarin left and rejoined the earth’s surface, held in thrall, in the meantime, by its curved gravitational path. It has been home to  Soyuz, Proton, Tsyklon,Dnepr, Zenit and Buran spacecraft, and took over shuttling supplies to the International Space Station after the Colombia tragedy.

Under Russia it was Leninsk. But it was returned to Kazakhstan, and Yeltsin afforded it a name change, though no-one knows where its most recent name came from. Some say Baikonur was so named to misdirect the West. It is really a small Russian mining town about 20o miles northeast of the launch pads.

It has a small, unassuming museum, created partly out of Yuri Gagarin’s cottage, filled with bits and pieces from the space race.

NASA uses barges; but Leninsk was gifted the largest industrial railway on the planet to haul the great spaceships to their launch pads.

Image via Wikipedia

Today my eyes lit on a Telegraph picture of the day. It was the bottom portion of a space  rocket, a jet bound for the stars. A Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket, to be precise, with a distinctive cargo. It carried a Bion-M satellite.

The Russians have never had much compunction about sending animals into orbit. The last rocket was expected to land on May 19 according to the Russian Space Web.And if it is like its predecessor,  the satellite going into space yesterday was filled with biological experiments.

Animals in space. A sort of cosmic Noah’s ark, lacking only a cataclysm on earth to make the allegory complete.

The first Bion-M flight started out on April 19, and if the landing was successful, touched down a calendar month later.

I wonder how much we will learn about the creatures that spent a month orbiting the globe?

Take a look at these amazing panoramic views. Hypnotic, epic, unforgettable.

Picture via theonering.com

I was sitting in church behind a music stand waiting for the mass to begin when my daughter turned and spoke to me in Elvish.

I have little idea what she said, beyond the vague knowledge that it was some kind of salutation. It was not even the first time she has spoken to me in Elvish. But it took me by surprise because it was so utterly effortless.

It was as though we were all speaking Elvish all of the time and indeed, the congregation might pipe up in a hymn written in this tongue which is, when all is said and done, completely fictional.

Maddie is increasingly using Elvish. She has a compatriot in school, I believe, who is learning Elvish with her during lunchtimes. I can see the trend growing. And what if she began to write in Elvish? Would her stories catch on? Where would this Elvish tale end?

J.R.R.Tolkien has become rather a way of life these days. Even when I was small I had a map of Middle Earth up in the wall, which I would study solemnly as I read and re-read his work.  Had Elvish tutorials been readily available, needless to say I would have learnt the language too.

But the original language Tolkien created before the outbreak of the first world war had a different name: Quenya.

It is easy to forget that before the stories, came Tolkien’s love of language. The man was a philologist: a discipline which combines literary studies, linguistics and history. By the time Quenya came along, Tolkien was already familiar with Latin, Greek, Spanish, Norse, Old English and Gothic languages. He loved words and their provenance.

And then he met those magician storytellers, the Finns, and read their Kalevala. And the lilting beauty of their tongue birthed the possibility of a High Elvish for Tolkien.

He began with what the linguists call a proto-language, a root language from which others stem. He made it up, of course, but it provided root words on which he could build different outcomes.

And then he began to build the fictional tongue which hordes strive to learn and speak today. The language grew and evolved and it seemed to Tolkien that the words needed those to speak it, and they would need a back story. In a letter to a reader he wrote: ”I find the construction and the interrelation of the languages an aesthetic pleasure in itself, quite apart from The Lord of the Rings, of which it was/is in fact independent.”

He never intended it to be used for communication, it is said. But by the 1970s people were creating new words and adding elements to make this something in which one could actually speak to other people. As of 2008 about 25,000 Elvish words were included in an encyclopaedia of Elvish.*

And now, surf the net and it’s all out there. the chance to find out what your Elvish name is. Phil is Dínendal Anwarünya. Macaulay the dog is Arminas Anwarünya. We have the opportunity to speak Elvish phrases and learn the way the author-philologist intended.

Or did he? Where does Tolkien’s language end and our wishful thinking begin?

Maybe, simply the groundswell of will to speak this piece of make-believe will take it where Klingon never ventured: to the creation of an Elvish state, and a new Rivendell.

*Kloczko, Edward (2008). L’Encyclopédie des Elfes (in French). Le Pré aux Clercs.

“Gardens,” said Mr Rudyard Kipling,”were not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade.”

Once upon the time the garden was my baby. I loved plants and despised decking, idolised Vita Sackville West and her life’s work at Sissinghurst; I wrote for the paper on gardens, I planted and loved mine tenderly, and as all gardens do, this one, a little patch of earth in Kent, it thanked me.

Phil and I would barter: how much lawn can I dig up? Where might I place another bed?

And we are talking small gardens here. There are houses with big gardens in England, but there are many more with modest little patches of earth. I crammed a tiny Kent garden with colour and form and traditional borders, and Phil said I could have the grass as long as I sank small clay terracotta pots and made him a miniscule nine-hole golf course.

Which I did: and Summer nights were spent with tipsy friends trying to coax golf balls around the smallest course in England.

Gardens have manners. They are polite. When one lavishes care and attention on one, it is like one of those guests who, with every syllable, make you resolve more firmly to have them back again another time. Their company is a salve, a diverting conversation, a quiet companionable silence.

But when you leave them, and neglect them, they become like a recalcitrant child.

And it has been a trying few years here in England. Rain and cold do not encourage one to go out into the garden. Winter generally sends one inside for months at a time, leaving the garden to the cat and the dog, the fox and even the odd badger.

That and family are my excuses for neglecting the baby I once loved with such a passion.

Yesterday I looked out at the disgruntled garden which, ever since I moved in, I have so often ignored and short-changed.

It is a strange place, all paved and yet there is the forest at the fence, craning towards the little space with all its mighty strength, a small bastion of human occupation squaring uncertainly up to nature.

And I began. I put all the old plastic toys and bikes and pots and rubbish in the car and drove it to the tip. I set Phil to burning the old broken garden bench. He loves burning things.

Inch by inch I began reclamation of that space. I love you, forest, I said to it, but back off.

With secateurs I warded the old tree-spirits off, and I dug borders. My daughter was interested: but 12 years olds do not have a woman’s eyes, and things like weeds and dug borders fly past them unnoticed. I gave her some earth and a trowel and some flowers and she sat among the weeds happily planting. Thus is a love of plants engendered.

After a day of back-breaking work the bones of the old garden were showing again.

May Sarton said it best: “Everything that slows us down and forces patience,,” she observed,” everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.”

Teatime. Phil suggested fish-and-chips and everyone said ooooh, yes please.

And after Maddie had pottered off with Phil to pick up dinner, I looked at her garden.

It had its own monolith, and unlike the great rocks of Avebury and Stonehenge this had pretty flowers planted at its feet. And it was inscribed: “Away with the fairies.”

Never a truer word.

A response to Side View’s weekend theme: Amusing Consequences, details of which you may find here.

Image from http://www.ruislip.co.uk

In the great city of Moscow lies an ancient  monastery-fortress, whose origins go back through time to the fourteenth century.

And in the tiny English village of Alresford lies a small set of public toilets.

And the two are inextricably linked.

Linked by a story of subterfuge, intelligence and counterintelligence, the two buildings each hold clues to the activities of a spy ring which, when it was unearthed, hit the headlines as one of the great tales of cold war intrigue.

Undersea warfare - the submarine and its capabilities – was a major part of the posturing which went on during the Cold War. Which made the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment, based at Portland on the English Dorset Coast, a desirable target indeed.

It was a mole who squeaked in 1959 to the CIA. The Russians were getting information from the base to which they should not be privy. And immediately surveillance began to root out the source of the sensitive information which was seeping out of the base.

They did not have to look far. Former sailor, and clerk at the base, Harry Houghton, lived it large. He owned his house. He drank like a fish and treated everyone to rounds at the pub, flashing his cash for all to see. And he had just, at the time of the beginning of the investigation, bought his fourth car.

Clerk’s incomes do not afford such a lifestyle.

And he had a mistress: Ethel Gee. She also worked at the establishment and had access to sensitive records.

As MI5 watched, the story unfolded before their eyes. They used to trip up to London to meet one Gordon Lonsdale, who purported to be a Canadian jukebox and bubble gum machine salesman. And they would exchange packages.

Not always, though. Into the frame came a small set public toilets in a sleepy Hampshire village, amongst the watercress beds which used to supply Covent Garden. Harry would leave packages there on occasion.

Lonsdale visited others in his daily life: especially an antiquarian bookseller called Peter Kroger and his charming wife, Helen.

On January 7, 1961, MI5 moved in. They asked Special Branch to arrest the sailor-clerk, the secretary and the bubble gum machine salesman. The secretary’s bag was stuffed with photographs and classified material.

And when they visited the bookseller’s wife, she too went straight for her handbag. But MI5 got there first. It was crammed with microdots- those tiny photographs they used to take of classified documents. Bookshops are such a convenient repository for such material.

And so the whole thing came out into the open.

Houghton and Gee were sentenced to 15 years in prison; and when they came out, they married.

The Krogers were sentenced to 20 years in prison, and were exchanged for a British spy in 1969.

And the bubble gum machine salesman?

His real name was found to be Konon Trofimovich Molody. In 1964, in Berlin, he was exchanged for a British spy. But his return to Mother Russia was not an entirely happy one.

He wrote an autobiography which was a clumsy tissue of deception, Claiming he was born in Canada. He was still cloaking himself in the identity of the dead man whose passport he had assumed all those years before. He was given a fairly minor post, and drank heavily.

The Russian doctors began injecting him with ‘blood pressure medication’ and he began to feel grim. The doctors told him it would feel worse before he felt better.

He died at 48 in mysterious circumstances on a mushroom-picking exhibition.

And they buried him next to another failed spymaster, Rudolf Abel, in the Donskoy Monastery, far from the public toilets which he used to serve his purposes in his glory days.

I think I may be a reincarnated Benedictine Monk.

And not just any reincarnated Benedictine monk, either. A gyrovague. Oh, yes.

Several synods of the Catholic church-notably in 451 and 787- became increasingly exasperated with gyrovagues.

They didn’t have to be Benedictine but they did have to be cloisterless. They would not settle in a monastery, but travelled from place to place. And as a man they acquired the worst reputation possible. They sold confessions, and fake relics, and spent their ill-gotten gains on gluttony and the passions.

Recognise the type? He swaggers though the Canterbury Tales: here’s a rough translation of our introduction to the portly rogue:

“The rule of Maurice or Saint Benedict,

By reason it was old and somewhat strict,

This said monk let such old things slowly pace

And followed new-world manners in their place.

He cared not for that text a clean-plucked hen

Which holds that hunters are not holy men

Nor that a monk, when he is cloisterless,

Is like unto a fish that’s waterless;

That is to say, a monk out of his cloister.

But this same text he held not worth an oyster.”

The average monk, a three-year-study of Mediaeval monks found, would eat 6,000 calories on a good day. 4,500 a day when they were fasting. Which gyrovagues didn’t.

It is the whole gluttony business which convinces me I have carried my attitude to food from a past life. I do not need to by hungry to eat: I eat for pure pleasure. I arrived at for an evening restaurant meal with friends recently and confessed artlessly that I had helped the children with their chicken nuggets and chips before I came out.

My hor d’oeuvres had not the slightest effect upon my main meal.

Monks did not wear trousers. This is an important facet of knowing when enough is enough. When your trousers get tight to the point that you get cross with them, it is time to do something.

So while in another life my robes just got increasingly voluminous, in this one Marks and Spencer’s formed a strict governor greater than all the powers of Holy Mother Church.

My trousers began to enrage me.

So, with a sigh, my husband and I resolved to do something about it. And it appears that after manymanymany years of spartan diets there is one for past-life gluttonous Benedictine gyrovagues.

It is called the 2 in 7 diet, and I expect some of you are on it too. Only we never do things by halves, and we went for 4 in 7: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we eat, drink and be merry.

So Monday is generally manageable because we’re still working off Sunday’s excesses.

By Tuesday I am thinking: “Are we nearly there yet?” and the next two days stretch out like a yawning chasm, a wasteland. Dinner seems woefully inadequate, but I am ravenous, and every mouthful achieves incredible significance.

By Wednesday, Eating has become a deeply spiritual occupation. I commune with my food. This Wednesday I got to the bottom of my chicken soup and spoke to the void. “Bye bye, soup. You were really lovely. Let’s do this again very soon.”

My daughter rolled her eyes. “Good grief, Mum’s talking to her dinner now,” she observed to the deeply attentive cat who, for the record, may also be a past-life Benedictine gyrovague because he eats everything available all of the time.

Thursday. Life is monochrome: melon has lost any charm it had at the beginning of the week. Thank God for work away from the kitchen cupboards. I send up a silent prayer of thanks  to he whom I must have been petitioning for a thousand years if my reckoning is right.

Today I went out to the shops and bought bacon. And I shall wake tomorrow, and grill Phil and I a deeply irreligious bacon sandwich. No, two. No, make that four.

It’s tough being a former gyrovague.

Click on this to see the detail of pre-Great Fire London:Picture from http://www.Gutenberg.com

Madeleine sat in her geography lesson, attending carefully to the slide show.

She was learning about how man could shape his environment to make it safer. Open places, buildings which overlooked each other, wide open, light spaces: these were all less likely to shield criminal activity.

And then the geography teacher showed a picture of a great office block and an underpass below. This, she said, was less desirable.

Maddie did a swift double take. The office block looked awfully familiar.

“Miss, ” she said politely, raising her hand: “I live there!”

It was indeed our town. A new town, an intended Utopia, designed to serve its satellite housing estates with walkways which went under the roads. And now everyone drives and the subways are generally deserted .

The geography teacher coloured. Ideally, to illustrate geography which fosters criminal activity, perhaps she should have stuck to London. Felix and I use those subways to cycle all the time, and the crime rate in our new town is comparatively low.

No: a London tower block of the right persuasion might do it. Or how about a city which no longer exists: say, London before the fire?

Now there was a den of iniquity. Narrow lanes and cramped overhanging houses made the London Streets dark and unsavoury places.  So much so, that really wealthy people were uneasy even about stopping for too long in case someone helped themselves to the contents of their carriage.

They had a solution, of course. They paid a poor person.

It was the custom to employ a ‘running footman’. They had to be tall and athletic because, while the carriage rattled across the unforgiving cobbles of London, the footman must run beside the carriage. It was his job to clear the way for the carriage, and pay tolls, and generally ease the passage of the very rich indeed through London.

All the best families had one. They were a status symbol, running footmen. They could clear pigs and chickens and still retain energy to announce their master’s arrival at their destination, though how they had the breath I will never know.

It is an outrageous division of labour. Tell you what: I ride in comfort in this carriage and you jog obediently outside and do all my dirty work.

After the Great Fire the need for them was not so great, the streets being wide and light and cleaner than before.

But it was a footman who had the last word on the practice.

And it was with the last nobleman to proclaim his status by keeping a running footman: the Marquess of Queensbury.

It is recorded that the Marquess used to interview running footmen by standing on his balcony in Piccadilly, watching candidates running up and down the street and timing them. Before they interviewed, they must be lent an expensive kit: full livery, made from the finest of materials. Clothes most men would covet, to keep the London winters out.

So one day, the Marquess discovered a really excellent runner. He was head and shoulders above all the other candidates, tells Edward Walford in Old and New London. He would do magnificently tearing alongside the Marquess’s carriage.

When he came to a standstill beneath the balcony the Marquess was well pleased. “You will do very well for me,” he informed the man. And at this, the man replied “and your livery will do very well for me!”, and shot off at high-speed through the London crowds with the pricey kit, never to be seen again.

Which goes to show that all the light and space in the world cannot arm a Marquess against a wily criminal.