Wednesday, March 15, 2006

The Fabulous Crocodile Twins

… as Mrs. Malaprop should have known.

Listening to Jim and John by Ed and Lonnie Young – it’s older than my dad.

John Hegley has a poem which goes as follows :-

Luton

a poem about the town of my upbringing and the conflict between my working-class origins and the middle-class status conferred upon me by a university education.

I remember Luton
As I'm swallowing my crout'n


This always cracks me up but hearing it has reminded me of my own bathetic moment of class distinction from college days. We were required to hand in small reports at regular intervals that detailed our progress in group projects we were working on. One of these was returned to us after being passed around various members of the department. It was rather scruffy and above the title was a nasty, greeny-yellow smudge which might have been mistaken for something really horrible had it not been ringed with a scribbled note which read “Dr. Waters’ Avocado”. Not that we laughed at the time; this was in the days when students lived on baked beans in damp garrets and an avocado was something exotic, only found at Waitrose and those posh shops in Clifton. It was almost as if Dr. Waters was rubbing it in.

However, we must realise that Dr. Waters was the archetypal ascent from working class boy to academic-done-good. He had started in the IT department for Lyons Tea Shops and while lecturing us was still working as a consultant around the country if not the world. I bet you didn’t know that Lyons Tea Shops, the home of the Nippy, was at the vanguard of the use of commercial computers in this country. Well Sam Waters was in at the beginning, a cockney boy, I imagine in the mould of the school-leaver going straight into high-flying commerce. I have just seen that this book about the whole subject is available. I have also seen that a copy is available at the local library – I love the whole webby thing and this is one of the things what started it all. Gov!

I wouldn’t actually have put Dr. Waters down as an avocado man myself. Maybe it was some more noxious substance and they were just covering up the dastardly deed. Maybe we have been contaminated by some radioactive sludge that just happens to be greeny-yellow. He did have a wonderful line in stock phrases one of which was “It blew there socks off”. For the last lecture of the term, we arranged to bring in a spare pair of socks which we would throw at him when he said it. Maybe he had been tipped off but he did not use the phrase, which meant that one of us had to stand up and say “Thank you for a great lecture Dr. Waters. It really blew our socks off.” Cue barrage of Inter-lecture-room- ballistic-sockage. I would assume he has retired now. Maybe he is in the book. I was of course another 15 years before I managed to eat an avocado. Now I can’t get enough of them. There is of course another name to add to my list of good names for groups – Dr. Waters’ Avocado – though it might be better as the title of a Radio 4 afternoon play. Adrian Mole would love it.

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