Here in London’s Crouch End we are governed by the benevolent burghers of Haringey Council.

So inclusive and caring are they that they have written to our local bus stop offering it business tips to help it through the recession.

This remarkable initiative came to light when our postman decided to deliver the letter to the bus stop’s nearest neighbour, Peter Floyd, in Ferme Park Road. Officers at Haringey Council had addressed the package to Bus Shelter 0114—123.

A “Rillington” is the quick and easy name for a Compact Fluorescent Lamp, also known as an Eco Light Bulb. In Tesco it’s called Energy Saving Sticks. Notice no mention of Light.

Rillingtons are perfect for people who don’t read and who don’t need lighting to see or do things by.

They are also packed with my favourite metal, mercury, which has magical properties but is also rather poisonous, so you can’t throw them away.

Rillingtons are sold in brightnesses ranging up to 15 watts, which means three of the brightest rillingtons can produce nearly as much illumination as an ordinary 35 watt lightbulb, if such a thing existed (which it doesn’t, because no-one can read by the light of a 35 watt bulb).

They have the benefit of taking five to ten minutes to reach peak light emission, during which time you can give up on your book and instead go looking for a rafter to sling your rope over.

Once fully alight, a rillington will bathe the few parts of the room its feeble beams can reach with a sickly reseda, like angel’s vomit.

Spend ten minutes in this light and even the arrival of John Reginald Christie would be greeted as a ray of sunshine.

Christie, for those who don’t know, was a serial killer in 1940s and 50s London. He lived in and operated from Rillington Place, a now-demolished cul-de-sac in North Kensington, and a more depressing and hopeless place I never wish to see. I cycled over there as a morbidly curious teenager and even in the weak sunshine it made you want to top yourself.

So Rillington passed into my vocabulary as the epitome of dinginess, depression and gloom. The film “10 Rillington Place” captures the despair of the place and the period to perfection.

Now we can all share in the misery induced by this awful, melancholic, forgotten period. Just replace all your lovely warm, bright lightbulbs with rillingtons and you too can sit alone with suicidal thoughts. Because you certainly won’t be able to read by them.

You can throw away your dimmer switches too, because you won’t be needing them. What’s the point in dimming the already dim? Oh, I forgot — rillingtons won’t work with dimmer switches anyway.

What if you decide that a future spent lurking in the gloaming without any reading matter isn’t quite the brave new world you’d planned, and you decide not to throw away your bright, non-poisonous, mercury-free lightbulbs?

Tough. They’ve been banned, and Rillingtons are now compulsory.

I’m with Goethe on this one.

Mehr Licht!

I wish I could get as much publicity for fotoLibra as this little dinosaur has been getting. Still, it took her 47 million years to come to prominence, so we can wait awhile yet.

The unveiling of the fossil has come as part of a carefully-orchestrated publicity campaign, unusual for scientific discoveries, but to me the intriguing thing about the story is that Darwinius masillae, familiarly known as Ida, was discovered in a quarry near Darmstadt, Germany as long ago as 1983, and the bloke who discovered it kept it hidden in his (he could only have been a man) collection for 25 years.

What sort of person does that? If I’m proud of something, I tell everyone. I want everyone to know, and to share my pleasure.

Some people are exactly the opposite. If they possess or know something rare or valuable, they want no one else to see it. They want to have it all to themselves.

I love follies. So much so, I co-wrote a book about them to share my enjoyment. Then I co-founded the Folly Fellowship, to spread the word and get more and more people interested. This was easy meat for journalists, lots of great stories and anecdotes, wonderful copy. So the Folly Fellowship got lots of publicity, and I had great fun. Every time there was an article about us, more people joined.

I thought this was a Good Thing, but others on the Committee disagreed. They felt all this press attention was vulgar, and that follies should be the preserve of an educated, intellectual few. They wanted to publish academic journals and learned articles, and couldn’t be having with the οἱ πολλοί picnicking and littering all over their sacred groves.

They wanted to keep follies for themselves, to keep the thrill of private ownership. I can dimly comprehend that — I really only want to see follies when I’m by myself or with one other person — but I want the world to share my pleasure and excitement with them. They didn’t, so I was thrown out.

Like the discoverer of the Darmstadt dinosaur (OK, I know it’s a sort of lemur and not a dinosaur but I like the alliteration) the Committee of the Folly Fellowship has now succeeded in returning follies to the obscurity from which I plucked them. As the Michael Martin of the Folly Fellowship (came from nowhere, ousted before my time, a complete shit) I should be able to understand this need for secrecy.

But I can’t. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

Harlan Ellison, the renowned science fiction writer of restricted growth, has accused the Cleveland Arts Prize, awarded to him for Lifetime Achievement by his home town of Cleveland, Ohio of being a fraud and a scam, apparently because Cleveland wouldn’t fork out for his travel expenses in going to collect it. I must say that does sound a bit cheap, but The Mistake On The Lake is no longer a wealthy city.

Ellison wrote ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’, the greatest ever episode of Star Trek. He shared Douglas Adams’s enthusiasm for deadlines, so much so that the producers had to lock him in a room until he finished the script. He took revenge by eating all the pot plants.

Years ago Thom Tessier and I went to see Ellison at his house in the Hollywood hills. He was a genial if slightly prickly host, but I wasn’t aware how sensitive he was about his height until he invited us into his study. Both Tessier and I are 6′ 2″, while Ellison’s study doorway was less than four feet high. Basically his idea was that we should enter on all fours, or at least on bended knee, in front of The Presence. I remembered a British Ambassador in Victorian times encountering a similar situation, so I copied him and crawled into the room backwards, saluting Ellison with my great arse first.

To his credit he found this hilarious.  I was immediately distracted by his four sublime Quad Electrostatic loudspeakers, the finest ever made (unless you like bass lines) hanging from the ceiling. He was delighted I appreciated them, and we eventually parted on excellent terms.

Since then he appears to have specialised in being awkward and contentious. I hope Thom and I aren’t the reason.

Alarm has been voiced over a seemingly innocuous expenses claim for “3 cappuccinos” at the BAPLA Picture Buyers Fair by a company director, said to be fotoLibra MD Gwyn Headley.
“It’s not the expense, it’s the principle of the thing,” asserted fotoLibra’s company secretary Yvonne Seeley. “We have a clearly understood policy that only one cappuccino may be consumed before lunch, and this flies in the face of acceptable behaviour.
Picture buyers were said to be outraged at the sight of the Dear Leader, as he is known to thousands of enslaved photographers, dallying with a second large cappuccino, allegedly as early as 10:30 in the morning.
“This caffeine-crazed binge must be stamped out,” stated Seeley as she headed gimlet-eyed towards the bank.
Meanwhile Headley, not denying the allegations, protested that the stimulant was essential to his ability to carry on business on behalf of his fotoLibra constituents. “Our photographers supply our stock in trade,” he asserted, “and without them we have nothing. My first concern has to be for their well being, and for that I need to keep going throughout the day. My BMI is an irrelevance in this situation, and frankly it was underhand of my critics even to raise the matter.”
In the face of growing unrest, Headley remains calm. “Naturally we listen to all points of view, and if it involves having a cup of coffee, then so be it. I have to take it on the chin. It’s my job.”
Co-director Seeley remained intransigent. “He knows the rules. If he chooses to go beyond the boundaries, then it’s his lookout. A politician spends 44p on a bathplug and it hits the front page of every paper. A picture librarian spends £8 on coffees and nobody turns a hair. It’s an outrage.”
Headley shrugged. “I had to do something to get into the public eye. Some may call it a stunt. But I needed that caffeine, and the expenses claim seemed the easiest way to get it. Had I known it would blow up into such a storm in a coffee cup, I’d have ordered four.”
Analysts forecast Headley’s BMI will remain much the same and may even diminish over the next few months. The ‘Cappuccino Crisis’ should be seen for what it is — simply an attention-seeking ploy to distract notice from headline-hugging politicians.

There’s trooble in t’valleys and those bloody fundies are kicking up a fuss again, and all of a sudden Swat is in the news. This curiously named place once had an even more curiously named leader, and as a child I was enchanted by Edward Lear’s nonsense poem about its remote and impossibly romantic ruler. I asked my father, who knew everything, and he told me Swat was near the Khyber Pass (even more exciting) and that the Akond was the local king. Nearly true.

In fact Swat is an ungovernable hotbed of deranged religious maniacs who subjugate women and slaughter their countrymen and outsiders with equal fervour. I’m sure it’s a very beautiful place, but it’s about as supportive of human life as the surface of Mars.

The Akond of Swat turned out to be a real person, a “Muslim saint” who died in 1877. An akond leads a Muslim religious community. The preferred transliteration is currently Akhoond rather than Akond, but Swat remains Swat. Here’s Edward Lear’s wonderful poem.

Laugh with me.

THE AKOND OF SWAT

Who, or why, or which, or WHAT, Is the Akond of SWAT?

Is he tall or short, or dark or fair?
Does he sit on a stool or a sofa or chair, or SQUAT,
The Akond of Swat?

Is he wise or foolish, young or old?
Does he drink his soup and his coffee cold, or HOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he sing or whistle, jabber or talk,
And when riding abroad does he gallop or walk, or TROT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he wear a turban, a fez, or a hat?
Does he sleep on a mattress, a bed, or a mat, or a COT,
The Akond of Swat?

When he writes a copy in round-hand size,
Does he cross his T’s and finish his I’s with a DOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Can he write a letter concisely clear
Without a speck or a smudge or smear or BLOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Do his people like him extremely well?
Or do they, whenever they can, rebel, or PLOT,
At the Akond of Swat?

If he catches them then, either old or young,
Does he have them chopped in pieces or hung, or SHOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Do his people prig in the lanes or park?
Or even at times, when days are dark, GAROTTE?
O the Akond of Swat!

Does he study the wants of his own dominion?
Or doesn’t he care for public opinion a JOT,
The Akond of Swat?

To amuse his mind do his people show him
Pictures, or any one’s last new poem, or WHAT,
For the Akond of Swat?

At night if he suddenly screams and wakes,
Do they bring him only a few small cakes, or a LOT,
For the Akond of Swat?

Does he live on turnips, tea, or tripe?
Does he like his shawl to be marked with a stripe, or a DOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he like to lie on his back in a boat
Like the lady who lived in that isle remote, SHALLOTT,
The Akond of Swat?

Is he quiet, or always making a fuss?
Is his steward a Swiss or a Swede or a Russ, or a SCOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he like to sit by the calm blue wave?
Or to sleep and snore in a dark green cave, or a GROTT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he drink small beer from a silver jug?
Or a bowl? or a glass? or a cup? or a mug? or a POT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he beat his wife with a gold-topped pipe,
When she lets the gooseberries grow too ripe, or ROT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he wear a white tie when he dines with friends,
And tie it neat in a bow with ends, or a KNOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he like new cream, and hate mince-pies?
When he looks at the sun does he wink his eyes, or NOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he teach his subjects to roast and bake?
Does he sail about on an inland lake, in a YACHT,
The Akond of Swat?

Some one, or nobody, knows I wot
Who or which or why or what
Is the Akond of Swat!