For the past few months I have been partially preoccupied in a semi-futile struggle to preserve the noble heritage of the village where I have lived, in a state of harmonious discord with everyone else, for about 10 years.
The importance of maintaining local traditions locally cannot be emphasised too much, except by the use of unnecessary hyperbole, and the controversy in which I now find myself an epicentral figure concerns obscure rural traditions going back at least a decade, and those around me who wish to traduce them. The explanation begins at home chez nous.
Our house is a converted cowshed (with the cows taken out of it first, obviously). Of course, it has lost that indefinable ambience redolent of a functional cowshed, that unique bovine je ne sais quoi which emanates from most groups of cows, mainly because the vast majority of the cow-related droppings and other memorabilia were removed along with the cows themselves.
All that remains, as a memorial to every single past tenant who ever lived here, is a lone carton of Pasteurised Semi-Skimmed milk (4 pints/2.272 litres), which stands sentinel in the door of the refrigerator, rather like the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey only smaller and slightly more perishable. Adding insult to injury, cow-wise, the milk didn’t even come from a cow (it came from Tesco’s).
The property was built in 1856, between the end of the Crimean War and the start of the Indian Mutiny, although this is probably just an otherwise irrelevant unrelated coincidence.
Following a series of mysterious cow disappearances in the East Gloucestershire area (in 1856) a Cowshed Initiative was launched at the highest levels of British Government. All farmers (with cows) were compelled by law to start building cowsheds as fast as they could before the rapidly escalating Cow Deficit spiralled crazily out of control.
So, everybody went rushing around like mad building these sheds, and putting their cows into them at night, in order to pre-empt further inroads into these very same cows by the local branch of the Cow Fetish Society. It was a good idea which was partly 100% successful, but which sadly resulted in the premature closure of the CFS as early as last year.
I was surprised (but not much) at how many people around here regret the untimely demise of the CFS. I had no idea the Society was so popular. My personal philosophy regarding Fetishism, the one constant ideal I have held on to in a constantly changing kaleidoscope of changing constants, is that the object of one’s devotion should ideally be smaller than a cow and somewhat more portable.
My Fetish Strategy, which I will call Small Is Beautiful But Not Necessarily, is one which may not, to her possible future regret, arouse the ardour of the woman who fell in love with the Berlin Wall in 1961 (the year of its birth), married it in 1979 and, despite a well publicised break up in November 1989 which caused her husband to fall apart completely, claims to be married to it still.
Eschewing tasteless jokes concerning erections, I can also reveal that in previous lives this same courtisane des constructions was shacked up with several fences, a guillotine and a couple of bridges. It is easy to see a pattern emerging here whereby the object of desire is divisive, (especially if it’s a guillotine) unless it is a bridge, in which case the object is of a unifying nature. My grasp of Macrofetishism, once recherche but now common knowledge probably, is but a distant memory in the darkest reaches of my brain, and so I must leave any further analysis to those with more recent qualifications in this discipline.
(If current trends are any help, the late Berlin Wall’s wife has been seen hanging around the Great Wall of China recently. This suggests to me that Size is becoming more important).
Anyway, in order to fund the building of these cowsheds, the farmers established a Co-Operative Society called the Organisation For Ungulate Cow Keeping Inside & Tethered, the initials of which were elaborately carved above the door of every shed in the scheme (hereafter referred to as as a Scheme Shed) in order to invest some degree of gravitas in the project. To this day, this acronym reminds the few visitors to our house of its proud historical role in the advancement of Cow-Based Sheltering and Protection Systems.
It is this nostalgic view of the cowshed’s history, and my desire to retain links with the glorious heritage which began and ended almost before it started, which has caused a cultural rift to appear between me and everybody else who lives in the village. It would seem that the reason we have had so very few visitors during the time we have lived here is that other souls, perhaps less sensitive to the preservation of important bovine artefacts, take one look at the commemorative initials carved above the door before stalking off to somewhere called High Dudgeon.
The issue came to a head a few months ago when I received a letter from the Local Postmaster, who had this to say on the subject of rural properties, postcodes and what is done and not done in the nomenclature department vis-a-vis house names.
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Dear Sir,
During a recent audit of house names in this area, it emerged that your present home is now called OFuckIt.
I would be exceedingly grateful if you would change this name to something which might reasonably be construed as being slightly more sympathetic to the needs of the countryside.
Thanking you in anticipation of a satisfactory outcome to this minor contretemps.
Yours faithfully,
Etc.
PS. Don’t forget to take advantage of this week’s Special Offer! You can have Two Mail Deliveries (Yes, TWO!) this week instead of the usual one delivery if you win our Lucky Dip Prize Draw!! Enter now!!! Remember, you’ve got to be in it to win it!!!
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Well of course, OFuckIt was news to me. Mon repos (chez nous) was called Rose Cottage when I bought it and, not surprisingly, that is the address I gave to various people when I moved here.
Disconcertingly, not to mention anything else, several days after I had moved in a Postman knocked on the door and handed me a batch of letters. In so doing, he informed me that I had to change the name of the house because it had never been registered, and anyway there were too many Rose Cottages around already, delivering mail was difficult enough as things stood without more Roses springing up all over the place, he was in a hurry and couldn’t stop and would I change the name by next Tuesday please otherwise my mail deliveries might suffer as a result, would I have a nice day and was I settling in OK, ah! excellent, goodbye for now and don’t forget about the name change sir, thank you.
One hour later, after I had redistributed the letters the postman gave me to the correct addresses, I checked the house name situation with the Local Postmaster, who confirmed that a new name was not only seen as highly desirable in the uppermost echelons of local Post Office circles but was, in fact, the Number One Bullet Point in its Mission Statement for that fiscal year.
I resisted the temptation to remind the Postmaster that I had already, in preparation for my relocation, sent upwards of Fifty Fucking Letters to various people informing them of the name of my new home, at a personal cost in stamps of over £15.00 sterling, which revenue had doubtless been tossed carelessly into the Post Office coffers thereby boosting its share price, and going some way towards ensuring a less disastrous trading period than usual for the second quarter of that Financial Year.
Employing a similar restraint, I also refrained from pointing out the existence of the PostCode, a postal addressing system invented by the Post Office which has been in use across the UK for the past Twenty Eight Fucking Years, and which claims to identify each property in the country to within a few yards (12.87 metres).
Instead, I printed another 50 letters advising the recipients that my address had now changed from Rose Cottage to some other name which I had not yet decided upon, and which would be communicated to them at a later date, notwithstanding the eccentricities of Postal Delivery Timetables.
I have been more than somewhat distracted between that time and this. I have had to a) watch 3 World Cup competitions (including qualifying games) b) gradually assimilate the effects of a disappointing performance by the so-called New Labour Government over the past 5 years and c) cope with the logistics involved in locating sufficient quantities of top quality hashish to keep me ‘spaced out’ for long periods of time after OD’ing on a) and b).
In the consequent induced lassitude I have experienced, especially when reading Party Election Manifestos, I may have inclined towards a policy of not giving a shit about anything at all, especially annoying demands from the Local Postmaster.
However, my negligence in failing to act more precipitously in this matter has now reaped a Golden Reward. The Postmaster made a bad tactical error in informing me in writing that our house is, in fact, called OFuckIt. His letter confirmed beyond doubt that OFuckIt had been registered as the property name by a Post Office apparatchik sometime in the dim and distant past. OFuckit was now official, rubber stamped by the Post Office itself and forever enshrined in print as a beacon of resistance to the Post Office Jackboot.
What joy.
Now, much of what precedes this paragraph is true, although I would be hard pressed to remember which bits those are at this late stage in the proceedings. Whether the Cow Keepers Union carving was already above the door when I took up residence here, or whether I carved it there myself with a Swiss Army Knife I got for my birthday in 1991, as a swipe at the Post Office following the despatch of the second batch of fifty letters, injuring my right thumb in the process and so necessitating Emergency Surgery at the local butcher’s shop, I cannot quite recall with 100% accuracy.
Clearly, I am now unwilling to relinquish the cachet which attaches to the property now that it has such a cool name. Therefore, since late May, I have been engaged in a meaningless battle of wits with the Postmaster in which he won’t read my letters because they are all headed ‘Re: OFuckIt’ (followed by a unique thirty seven digit reference number) and I won’t read his replies, even if there are any, because he refuses to adhere to orthodox letter referencing procedures by failing to reference my unique thirty seven digit reference numbers (preceded by ‘Re: OFuckIt’).
In order to strengthen my undisputed position on the Moral High Ground in this issue, I have also been motivated to do some historical research on the year 1856 and the events thereof. I have so far found mention of the birth of a Mr. Woodrow Wilson, the discovery of a Neanderthal Skull in Feldhofer cave (near Dusseldorf) and the first recorded instance of pure cocaine being successfully extracted from cocoa beans. Sadly, I suspect that these events occurred ‘abroad’ and are therefore of no interest to me in my quest for knowledge (except for the cocoa beans).
I have thus far failed to find any detailed records concerning the Great Cow Deficit of 1856 but this does not mean it didn’t happen. Many events in many countries are ‘hushed up’ at the time by The Authorities and the full details not released for about 500 years in case unwanted revelations embarrass the politicians involved, such as T. Blair, G. Bush (Sr. & Jr.), Gaius Julius Caesar, Rameses II (aka Ozymandias) and all the rest of them as far back as Gilgamesh of Sumeria, who carved all his secrets in cuneiform form on a tablet so if he caught you reading them he could beat you to death with the stationery.
I continue the search for Truth, not only in the fusty surroundings of the local library but also by digging the garden furiously in the hope of finding another, more plausible bovine artifact dating from the period in question. So far I have unearthed nothing more interesting than a set of sacrificial tools for use in a Black Mass, a bottle with a note saying Help inside, and an Unexploded Bomb dropped on the village during the Sheep Wars of 1976, which I conscientiously wrapped in brown paper, tied with some coloured ribbon and mailed to the Postmaster for his urgent attention.
While I perspire freely at my labours with spade on soil, I cannot help but think of the inherent irony which permeates this entire scenario as I note that my only observers are three cows in the field opposite which keep looking at me as though I personally have rendered them homeless.
And yes, I do think they are talking about me behind my back.
