Alice's Annotations at the Pantomime

Annotations

Alice's Adventures at the Pantomime was written (by myself) and illustrated (by Gilda Pacitti) as a spoof Christmas present for a small group of university friends. This, of course, means that it is full of insults, in-jokes and specific references to specific events. Which, in turn, means 90% of budding literary critics who wish to wrestle with the inexorable poignancy of the socio-cultural satire that nests within its burgeoning pages, won't understand a word of it.

So, as a (probably not terribly effective) get-around to this somewhat basic problem, I here present a few annotations which may, or may not, make it all clearer. Probably not.

The Cover and Introduction:

1. The Dedication - 'to the Hollingburies, without whom this would never have been necessary': In the book version, this is 'to Simon and Cristina…'. Each year, Simon and Cristina used to give away a Christmas present to the rest of us - this normally took the form of some kind of semi-professional, semi-humorous, semi-good radio play on cassette. AATP was an attempt to steal some of the glory back.

2. The Introductory Verse: This dire epic is: (i) epically dire, and (ii) an acrostic (the first letters of each line make a phrase).

3. Panguin Books: I am reliably informed that I pronounce 'penguin' as 'panguin'. This is, of course, not true, but I've had the Michael ripped for so long now that it has achieved the status of myth and legend. Honest.

The Panguin Books logo is Opus the penguin in a Santa hat, taken from the Bloom County cartoon strip by Berke Breathed. Don't tell him, 'cos he'll probably do me for copyright.

4. ISNT 0-907486-21-5: As you may have gathered, 0-907486-21-5 is the book's ISNT number because it ISN'T its ISBN. It's the ISBN for one of the Lewis Carroll Complete Works collections. (In the UK you're legally obliged to send a copy of every new book published - whether it has an ISBN or not - to the British Library. I did so with AATP, telling them the status of the ISNT number; they duly ignored everything I said and registered it with that number anyway. So, against all odds, there are now two books in Britain with the same ISBN, or so the records show.)

5. The Hollingbury Herald: While at university I and a number of the other characters from AATP lived at 54 Hollingbury Road, Brighton. The Hollingbury Herald was a mythical newspaper with which we threatened to keep in contact after we left and went our separate ways. Needless to say, it never materialised; but then, we haven't lost contact so it doesn't really matter.

I won't bother explaining the TIS and C L Dodgson.

Chapter I - Through the Stage Door:

1. The Pantomime, and the Folk in the Front Row: Traditionally - well, for about three years, anyway - we used to go en masse to a pantomime to celebrate New Year. We would sing the pantomime song badly, buy silly hats to wear, and shout out appropriate lines to annoy the actors. It was pretty anti-social, but what the heck? Anyway, I am happy to say that we have never been sued, and only once threatened with physical violence.

2. The White Rabbit: Simon (see above) owns a small and somewhat dilapidated stuffed white rabbit which used to make guest appearances in the Christmas tapes; it seemed appropriate, all things considered, to stick it in AATP too. The rabbit's name is Mackintosh, hence the raincoat and the title of chapter two.

3. The Viola: This character is based on Howard, a man who joined us one New Year. On the New Year's Day, he decided to drive off into the distance looking for restaurants for breakfast, leaving us to try to follow him. We have never seen him since.

4. Ma Dimmi Cosa Cerchi: This is an Italian phrase meaning "But tell me what you're looking for", and was the only thing in Italian that could be found to rhyme with 'turkey'. Why that was important escapes me, since the word 'turkey' does not appear. I like Italian, but I'm not very good at it.

Chapter II - Mackintosh and Mystery:

1. The Reeve and the Butterfly: The Butterfly is Rachel, a university friend, and the Reeve is her boyfriend of the time of writing, Dave Reavey; both are quite untenably thin. The mention of grass and snow is a drugs reference, but it's only there because Carroll made so many drug references himself; it should not be taken as a comment on anybody's life-style, least of all Rachel, who has never been known to indulge in drugs, deviant sexual practises or puppy nobbling. Ever.

2. The Sour Puss: I'm afraid I can't explain this one in the face of current libel laws. But it's a jolly good story, honest.

3. The 'READ-ME' Phial: Bad computer pun number 1. Sorry. The Swiss Potato Mountain is based on Neil, a Yorkshireman from Switzerland with whom I cohabited (in the nice sense) at Hollingbury Road. He ate a lot of potato and left the windows open (see chapter six).

4. "Curious and more curious still": This is meant to complement the famous 'Curiouser and curiouser' line; indeed, Alice 'complements' herself on her use of the grammar. Okay, so I can't spell. But at least I'm pretentious.

5. The Time in England: A vague acquaintance of mine, Alex, wears a broken watch which used to belong to her father; it has stopped at seventeen minutes past seven. Alex was a French major at university, and spent her third year in France. Whenever she was asked the time, she would look at the watch and say that, in England, it was seventeen minutes past seven.

Chapter III - To Hang a Book:

1. The Author and the Artist: Gilda and I irrespectively.

2. The Author's and the Artist's Poem: Another acrostic (ish). The cover illustration is of this poem's reading, and originally the paragraph immediately preceding the poem described the Artist painting a picture of the Author reading the poem for use on the sleeve. I changed this during the typesetting stage so as to fit everything in, but it would have explained the recursive nature of the poem better had I left it as it was. So I changed it back for this on-line version.

3. "To bind it up in walnut wood . . .": Originally, this line was "To bind it up with camphor oil," and jolly good it was, too. However, I came across some rather nice wrapping paper which looked just like walnut, and, deciding to use it for the cover, I made the change. I only discovered that I had hardly any of the paper left when I'd sent the manuscript to the printers. I was lucky, and eventually managed to get the cover, um, covered, but even now the jacket shows signs of stretch marks. As it turns out, they do use camphor oil in some forms of book binding; I didn't know that at the time. Fiction is stranger than truth, huh?

4. "To wait three months and three days more" and "For eighty days and ten and two": The eager student will infer from these lines that the three months in question are, in fact, February, March and April. Assuming, of course, that the three months are contiguous, and it's not a leap year. And that there are any eager students.

5. "To Eskimos, and Haitians": A close friend of mine, Carline, is Haitian. Contrary to popular belief, however, I am not well acquainted with any Eskimos.

6. The bit after the poem: For some reason, I filled this bit with a lot of 'game' jokes. No idea why.

7. This Page Intentionally Left Blank: Most computer manual writers will choose to place this motif in the centre of a page, rather than really leave it blank; obviously, technical authors think that members of the IT industry are too stupid to recognise a blank page on their own. So I decided to show this hypocritical and patronising attitude up for the intellectual detritus that it is. By doing exactly the same in AATP.

Unfortunately, in the printed book this little piece of techno-social satire backfired. The printer made an error and forgot to print the page, so I had to employ some 108 stickers. Poetic justice, really.

8. "I suppose we could give them this book, instead of the original . . .": One of S+C's Christmas tapes was, ostensibly, given to us to explain why they couldn't give us the 'real' tape, which had been stolen.

Chapter IV - The Whether-House:

1. The Whether-House: Originally, we wanted this to look like Brighton Pavilion, and there is reference to all the scaffolding and blue plastic which covered it throughout my university career. As soon as I left Brighton, they restored it to its former glory.

2. The Whether-Man and the Whether-Girl: Brian and Jessica, more of the New Year crowd. Brian works for the Beeb (see his illustration), and Jessica was still at Sussex University at the time. Reference is made to their predilection for collecting thirties paraphernalia - hair-brushes and teapots amongst other things - and Brian's piano adventures.

3. The Haggis and the Pudding: The pudding is my sister Rachel, and the Haggis is her husband Brian, a cricket-playing Scotsman. The poem is a parody of a Stanley Holloway-type monologue about haggis to which Brian introduced me.

4. Rainy Day: Many of Carroll's poems were parodies or pastiches popular songs of the day; this, and a number of the other poems in AATP, are parodies of Simon's music.

The Killabaub is a reference to Killer Bob from Twin Peaks. We never missed it. We were sad.

5. Mr DeWinter: Jon East, also from Sussex, originally introduced himself to me as a Belgian called de Winter. He made a very good Belgian, wrote a song called Celtic Capers which he played incessantly, and lost a tooth in a freak toilet accident. Don't ask.

Chapter V - Mirror Writing:

1. The Candle and the Teapot: Anna Wicks and Phil Tee. Phil was a physicist at Sussex who did a little work on cold fusion when the idea first surfaced.

2. The Pianist and the Ballerina: Simon and Cristina. Cristina is Italian, so it was obvious that the Ballerina should speak in italic.

3. The mirror writing: These two poems are French and German 'pantomime-translations' of Alice's version of Rainy Day - itself a sort-of phonetic translation from English into English of Simon's song - performed for the Whether People. I originally wanted to write three (unrelated) poems, one in English, one in French and one in German, whereby the first verse in one language was phonetically identical to the second verse in another, and so on cyclically.

But I couldn't manage it. So I did this instead.

4. "Two racehorses were sitting at a bar" and "Japon est un petit nation situé dans l'Ocean Pacifique": I have two favourite jokes. The first is a long one about talking racehorses who go out for a drink together - I shall not elaborate here - and the second is an educational knock-knock joke, which goes thus:

     - Knock! Knock!
     - Who's there?
     - Japan.
     - Japan who?
     - Japan is a small nation in the Pacific Ocean.

See? Funny, and you learn something. It seems only appropriate that one should be the pantomime-translation of the other.

5. Counting the seconds: Simon swears blind that he can count seconds so accurately that he will be able to keep in time with a digital watch over a period of ten minutes without reference to it. He has not yet managed to do it, and moreover, every attempt has taken a different length of time. He once dropped his assessment of his abilities to one minute; he still failed.

6. The Wyvern: The Wyvern, who also appears in chapter nine, is not meant to bear any relation to anybody. Rather, it is a character I dropped in so that, if anyone was insulted (fat chance!) that I had left them out, I could quickly claim they were the Wyvern.

(Interestingly, since the writing of this book Sub - the Accountant of chapter eight below - has married Yvonne, who, while not similar to the Wyvern in the least, at least has a plausibly similar name. Ish.)

Chapter VI - The Voyage of the Pwmgraf:

1. The Last Voyage of the Pwmgraf: This poem started out as an epic in the style of The Hunting of the Snark. Not a lot of it ever got written, but what did has resurfaced here. I dropped the word 'last' from the chapter title for purely aesthetic reasons - it made the title too long to fit on one line in the printed version.

The Pwmgraf was originally a commercial computer software package on which I worked at university during the vacations: the Poplog Window Manager Graphics package. Irwan, Dave and Neil, who are represented by characters in this chapter, all worked on or with the Pwmgraf at one point or another.

2. The Earwig: Irwan, a friend of mine from school who earns far too much and from whom I used to rent a flat.

3. "The Ballerina, did I hear?": Irwan had been trying to meet Cristina for quite a while, since his job took him into contact with her father and he wanted an extra chance to brown-nose. Unfortunately, I never once managed to arrange a meeting for them (ha ha ha).

I'm giving Irwan a very bad press here. But then, I paid him an extortionate rent, so I think that's fair.

4. The Mad Hatter and the March Hare: David Wheable and Neil Maury respectively. This passage follows on from the Swiss Potato Mountain reference earlier; when living in Hollingbury Road, Neil refused to pay the gas bill because he didn't feel the cold, and then proceeded to open every window he could find to prove it.

5. The Game of Squash: Dave and Neil used to play a lot of, you've guessed it, chess. Sorry, squash. They would come back from a game looking like death warmed up, and swear that it had done them the world of good. To be fair, they were a damn sight fitter than I ever was - they just didn't look it.

6. The Hatter's Mobile: Dave and I for a while worked at a robotics research establishment in Manchester; specifically, Dave worked on a mobile robot. This thing was meant to have an arm attached, and be able to wander through a room, avoiding objects and picking things up. It can't. It looks great, mind you, with all sorts of flashing lights, but it doesn't work, and the project was 'revolving in pointless circles' for a quite while. Then it got shelved.

Chapter VII - Panicking:

1. The Friar and the Monk: Andy Fryer and Kevin Monk; the characters just came out of the names.

2. The Ruin: Sussex University, which has fallen into disrepair since our departure. Honest. The little bridges and useless arches really do exist; no-one knows why.

3. The university disciplines: This follows on from the Mock Turtle's lessons. The courses - all ones which one or the other of the group studied - are as follows: Computing with AI (Artificial Intelligence); Philosophy of Mind; History of Art; Experimental, Developmental and Social Psychology; the modern languages, Italian, French and German; and English Literature.

4. What the Monk studied: Kevin kept changing his mind about the course he wanted to follow, and spent a couple of years on sabbatical managing the student co-op; he eventually graduated with a first, ten years after becoming an undergraduate. Lucky sod.

5. The Crypt and the Panics: The Crypt was a small, cellar-club on campus, where Kevin ran a weekly disco called Panic for a number of years. Kevin's Panics were of two sorts: those at the start of term, when one could get in for neither love nor money; and those from about the third week of term, when only two people would attend - Kevin and a bouncer.

6. Antidotal Incense: The strange meter in this poem is due to the fact that it is a parody of another of Simon's songs, Anecdotal Nonsense; it works if you know the song, but probably doesn't if you don't. The descriptions of the Friar's and Monk's dances are entirely accurate.

7. The Lamb: Chris Harrison, a person with a predilection for chocolate, and who can do a great impression of a sheep.

Chapter VIII - The Major and the Miner:

1. Goffering Tongs: I have absolutely no idea what these are, other than some kind of tongs for goffering with: I just opened up my OED and jabbed with a pair of compasses. I found the word 'glair' in the Author's and Artist's poem using the same method. It means egg-white.

2. The Accountant, the Raven and the Writing Desk: The accountant is Sub, a man who left university, became an accountant, hated it, and went back to university again. The raven/writing desk episode is a reference to the Mad Hatter's riddle from Alice in Wonderland ('What is the similarity between a raven and a writing desk?'). Most of us will see no connection between them; Sub will utterly confuse the two.

The beach is Brighton beach, between the Palace and West piers.

3. Months,' Weeks' and Days' names: In the Voyage of the Pwmgraf poem a couple of pantomime months are mentioned; I decided to try to come up with the rest, and also some pantomime day-names. Only the days made it into the final manuscript.

While working on this, I thought a little about the names of weeks (or lack of them). It did seem a little strange that we should quite happily afford names to months and days, but not allow weeks the same privilege; so I made up some week-names, to keep them happy. Since writing AATP I worked out that potentially six weeks may intersect with any single month; the sixth may as well be 'Mum Went To Iceland'.

4. Ottoman: This is a jolly good tactical board game, somewhat in the tradition of chess, but bearing very little actual resemblance to it. And yes, I designed it myself. Ottoman has had a sad history, having been rejected by every games manufacturer to whom I have sent it; so I included it here, in order that it shouldn't die in complete oblivion.

5. The Major and the Miner: The Lion and the Unicorn from Through the Looking Glass are widely supposed to be Gladstone and Disraeli. Similarly, Tenniel's illustrations of them resemble his drawings of the politicians in Punch, which was at the time one of the most satirical publications around.

Following that tradition, the Major and the Miner are John Major and Neil Kinnock, who were Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition respectively at the time of original publication. Gilda and I planned to also have some illustrations of the two based on their Spitting-Image puppets, that being the best latter-day counterpart of the Victorian Punch as far as we could tell; these never came to fruition.

6. Nail polish and the Emu: Two awful puns based on the big political questions of the day (at least, here in the UK). The Emu is, of course, European Monetary Union. Polish, when spelt with a capital letter, relates to things from Poland, or Poles. Nails can sometimes be described as tacks. Therefore, Nail Polish = Pole Tacks.

Sorry.

Chapter IX - A Bill for a Bombay Duck:

1. The Camel and The Gypsy: Andrew and Fiona; the characters comes from their erstwhile smoking habits, viz. Camels and Gitanes respectively.

2. The Bombay Duck: This is a completely fictitious creature, sort-of following in the tradition of the Mock Turtle. Once we had the idea of the Bombay Duck, the last line of the chapter seemed to just fall into place. Once again, I apologise.

3. The Bombay Duck's Song: This is a parody of a song which I wrote. Okay, I wrote it for Simon, but it's still mine, not his.

This parody of it was not seen as anything in particular, other than an easy way to get another poem in, and to fill a couple of pages.

Chapter X - Alice's Assessment:

1. The Judge: Jude, who also comes to the Pantomime with us if she's around at New Year.

2. "Will you be plaintiff?" "I shall be the plainest tiff you have ever seen.": The book was typeset using the MS Word for Windows package, and all the illustrations had to be stored on computer in a format the package could read. The format I used, by a happy coincidence, was the Tagged Image File Format, or TIFF. And the White Rabbit was pretty plain.

3. "Shall I tell your mother that you'll be late home for dinner?": Once upon a time, a group of us had gone to spend a day at the sea-side; it rained. We had taken refuge in a snooker hall, of all places, and were each trying to miss more balls than anybody else, when a short man approached Cristina and tried to chat her up. For a while she ignored him, but then he came out with the curious line: "Shall I tell your mother that you'll be late home for dinner?" before walking off.

To this day, we have no idea what he could have meant. Suggestions on a postcard, please . . .

Chapter XI - Watch:

1. "Watch behind your back!": When Cristina (who you will remember is Italian) first went to a pantomime she was not entirely sure what should be shouted when. She knew one of the things that one had to shout was something to do with looking behind you, and came up with the phrase: "Watch behind your back," which she shouted at every opportunity. Needless to say, we all adopted this. It really annoys the actors.

Chapter XII - Old Acquaintances:

1. The closing-poem acrostic: This took ages to write, and isn't very good. But it's even worse in the printed version.

I apologise for all the typos and grammatical errors throughout the text - that's what comes of not using a proper editor and proof-reader. I apologise for the bad jokes and terrible puns. Basically, I just apologise.

Nic Ford
January 1992