First Proper Blog

Thought I’d begin my blogging career with a controversial, hard-hitting, polemical piece. Start with a bang! So here it is - a mind-changing, wave-making thing.

Bow down to the Spud!

At the weekend a set of 100 postcards of penguin book covers came into my possession. Different series’ such as fiction, crime fiction, periodicals and handbooks are included in the set. 

The handbook series include such useful titles as: “Scootering”; “Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps”; and “The Art of Marriage”.   These are intended as guides to carry around and refer to when needed. So if you have a scooter you could keep this in your pocket or haversack and refer to it in times of need. If you have poultry and rabbits and were wondering what to feed them you could whip out your penguin handbook and get some guidance. Similarly if you’re in a marriage and your husband or wife is acting a bit surly, look it up in the” Art of Marriage” with advice on “all aspects of marriage”, which is appropriately written by Mary Macaulay a “well known doctor and  magistrate” - all the skills needed if things go pear shaped.  You’d carry this about your person throughout your married life safe in the knowledge that no matter what aspect of your marriage needs attention this book will have the answer.

 Other titles include: “There must be a Pony!”; “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism”; “Thinking to Some Purpose” and “Common Sense about Smoking”. In the fiction range there’s

• ”The Case of The Half Wakened Woman” and
• “Still she wished for Company”.

These all intrigue me.

It leads me to ask a number of questions: 

• Why must there be a Pony?
•  Is there a stupid woman’s guide to Socialism, Capitalism etc.? If not is this discriminatory? What about intelligent men? Don’t we need a guide to Sovietism and Fascism? How is it likely to differ from the intelligent woman’s guide?
• Are there too many people wandering about having purposeless thoughts? Apart from me that is.
• Was the half wakened woman permanently half wakened? Or only at certain times - like when she was waking up? 
• Was 'She' unreasonable in still wishing for company? Did she already have 25 people round to her bedsit and it was getting a bit cramped, and so it made sense to really just call it a day in terms of inviting people round?
• I don’t know the answer to these questions. But that’s not unusual there are lots of questions I don’t know the answers to. It’s normal.

All this intrigued me, but what intrigued me the most was periodical called New Biology. On the cover is a list of articles, and top of the list is the startling title: “The Potato: Master or Servant?”  (Now you see what I mean by hard hitting!)

What could this mean? Initially I thought to myself, “I cannot conceive of any situation in which the Potato (whether it be in general, as a species, or any individual potato, no matter how ambitious or driven) could be, in their relations to me (a human), a Master.”  This is radical stuff, I thought.  I can see, at a push, how a potato might be my servant.  It serves me by acting as a pile of creamy mash or a plate of chips! I get that. But Potato as Master?

What kind of society would it be where the potatoes ruled? What style of government would we experience? There isn’t really anything to go on, is there? Nothing we can refer to and say, “Well, when they came to power in post Soviet Estonia they were fairly dictatorial, and what they did to the Beetroots was unfair, but we never went short of Dauphinoise!"
There isn’t any evidence, other than we do know that they are heavily surveillance oriented. [There is a bad pun there but I’m not going to say it out loud!]  What would the political elites look like? I imagine most working class spuds would take up jobs in the media, giving their account of political activities. Yes they would because they would be Political Common-Taters.
So I finish my first proper blog with a terrible joke after having only just said that I wouldn’t utter the heavy surveillance oriented potato regime pun. No discipline. I will leave you with that. The first person to talk about the potato monarchy (yes, think of the names of potatoes) wins......nothing but utter contempt! And since I just talked about it, I will self-contemptuously stop.