The Young Ones - Series 1 - Episode 3

Martin has just been on the receiving end of some surreal sametime chats. I am on helpdesk again and the world looks a nice shade of boring grey. The banana chat was especially interesting but I think Martin has things to get on with so I will leave off for the time being. I brought my scrapbook in with me today as I had some A4 docs in it I wanted to keep flat. The cover is "Nothing - A Special Report" which sums up here quite well. Maybe it will turn itself inside out. Thank goodness for :-



Cooler than a Popsicle at the South Pole in June.

Turning somthing inside out reminds me of a wonderful book I read when I was a kid. There is no reference to it that I can find other than in a dry list of books. It was called "Fairy Grammar" and was about a very Middle Class boy of about eight, who did not know his parts of speech. He was persecuted (gently) by a slate pencil called "Rammarg" who would make the boy unable to use various parts of speech. In the first chapter, he was unable to use Nouns which, I hope you will agree, limits human speech quite a bit. As he learned these various parts of speech by his inability to use them, his parents became increasingly worried about these problems. Shades of "The man who mistook his wife for a hat"? At the end when all the Doctors have given up (like they did for Henry King and his bits of string), the Slate pencil turns itself inside out and upside down revealing that it is in fact a very lovely (though rather Victorian) Fairy - and "Rammarg" is "Grammar" backwards.

The details of the book are as follows :-

Carpenter, J. Harold
Fairy Grammar - 210.08; [Copyright Renewals] - 442.15.

but as I said this is the only reference I can find to it. My Dad may have it somewhere.

Strangely, while looking for "Rammarg", I found this page of backward English. Maybe, the links at the bottom should be avoided if you are of a nervous dispostion.