When I was a student, there was this pub in Brighton called the Norfolk. It was a market pub and, as a result, had a special licence, allowing it to stay open right through the night if the owners wanted. Ken the landlord didn’t want, but he did let people stay a bit longer to finish up their drinks. Because of that, and because it was right next to the art college, inevitably it was full of art students, those teaching staff who considered that working beyond lunchtime was uncivilised, one or two of the hardier old market traders, and a representative sample of the Brighton punk/mod/whatever subculture.

There was also Dave The Map. Dave was pretty popular, especially on Fridays and Saturdays when there was usually a party somewhere that someone had heard of from a friend of a friend’s brother’s next door neighbour. These parties could be anywhere in town, usually in a street no-one had heard of, and it was Dave’s job to consult his A-Z and tell us how to get there. All he needed in return was the slenderest of promises that he’d be let in too, and then off would troupe the whole pub (including the teaching staff and the old regulars) in search of after-hours entertainment. I don’t think it ever occurred to any of us that we might not be wanted. All you needed to say when you got to the door was “I’m a friend of Michael” (everyone knows at least one Michael) and the bemused hosts would let us in (unless it turned out to be an intimate dinner party, on which occasions the several scores of pond-life gathered around the front door would quickly evaporate leaving the people at the front of the hoarde to explain why Michael didn’t seem to know any of us). But aside from these exceptions, we thought that, after all, parties were places where you got to meet lots of new people so we were doing the community a service. Equally, I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone to buy their own map. That would have made Dave redundant and, in the first couple of years of Thatcher’s reign people still remembered what it was to be part of a society. We had responsibilities.

Wandering around town during the Pride celebrations this weekend, I heard several people mention that the festival itself is now overrun with kids just looking to get off their faces. As a result, a number of alternative parties have sprung up around St James’s st. Someone else told me these parties were ticketed events but, well, old habits die hard.

“O’re the smooth enameld green
Where no print of step hath been,
Follow me as I sing,
And touch the warbled string.

Under the shady roof
Of branching Elm Star-proof,
Follow me,
I will bring you where she sits,
Clad in splendor as befits
Her deity.
Such a rural Queen
Arcadia hath not seen.”

MIlton ‘Arcades’ 1633

Sometimes for sport the men of loafing crews
Snare the great albatrosses of the deep,
The indolent companions of their cruise
As through the bitter vastitudes they sweep.
Scarce have they fished aboard these airy kings
When helpless on such unaccustomed floors,
They piteously droop their huge white wings
And trail them at their sides like drifting oars.
How comical, how ugly, and how meek
Appears this soarer of celestial snows!
One, with his pipe, teases the golden beak,
One, limping, mocks the cripple as he goes.
The Poet, like this monarch of the clouds,
Despising archers, rides the storm elate.
But, stranded on the earth to jeering crowds,
The great wings of the giant baulk his gait.

Charles Baudelaire
‘The Albatross’ (in ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’)
Translated by Roy Campbell, 1952

“Now take care of yourself in Stymouth, Nephew Robinson. Beware of gunpowder and ship’s cooks, and pantechnicons, and sausages, and shoes, and ships, and sealing wax.”

Beatrix Potter: ‘The Tale of Little Pig Robinson’

“One day, as he was driving timid deer into his nets, he was seen by that talkative nymph who cannot stay silent when another speaks, but yet has not learned to speak first herself. Her name is Echo, and she always answers back.

Echo still had a body then, she was not just a voice: but although she was always chattering, her power of speech was no different from what it is now. All she could do was to repeat the last words of the many phrases that she heard. Juno had brought this about because often, when she could have caught the nymphs lying with her Jupiter on the mountainside, Echo, knowing well what she did, used to detain the goddess with an endless flow of talk, until the nymphs could flee. When Juno realised what was happening, she said: ‘I shall curtail the powers of that tongue which has tricked me: you will have only the briefest possible use of your voice.’ And in fact she carried out her threats. Echo still repeats the last words spoken, and gives back the sounds she has heard.

So, when she saw Narcissus wandering through the lonely countryside, Echo fell in love with him, and followed secretly in his steps. The more closely she followed, the nearer was the fire which scorched her: just as sulphur, smeared around the tops of torches, is quickly kindled when a flame is brought near it. How often she wished to make flattering overtures to him, to approach him with tender pleas! But her handicap prevented this, and would not allow her to speak first; she was ready to do what it would allow, to wait for sounds which she might re-echo with her own voice.

The boy, by chance, had wandered away from his faithful band of comrades, and he called out: ‘is there anybody here?’ Echo answered: ‘Here!’ Narcissus stood still in astonishment, looking round in every direction, and cried at the pitch of his voice: ‘Come!’ As he called, she called in reply. He looked behind him, and when no one appeared, cried again: ‘Why are you avoiding me?’ But all he heard were his own words echoed back…”

Ovid, Metamorphoses
Translated by Mary M. Innes 1955

“Rhyme them to death, as they do Irish rats,
In drumming tunes”

Ben Jonson ‘Poetaster’ (first performed 1601)

“I was never so be-rhymed since Pythagoras’ time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember.”

Shakespeare ‘As you like it’ (first performed 1603)

“There are people still in the west of the county of Clare who pretend to possess a form of satire for the banishment of rats. One man, Thomas Keane, land surveyor, now living near Kilkee, told me, about the year 1820, that he had thus banished one or more destructive rats from his mill and house at Belahaglass, near Dunlicky Castle, on the Kilkee coast. It must be remembered, that the rat satire was always composed in rhyme, and in the most obscure and occult phraseology of the Irish language…”

J. H. Todd and Eugene Curry ‘On Rhyming Rats to Death’ in: ‘Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1836-1869)’

“The vegetable Lamb of Tartary, also named Barometz and Lycopodium barometz and Chinese lycopodium, is a plant whose shape is that of a lamb bearing a golden fleece. It stands on four or five root stalks. Sir Thomas Browne gives this description of it in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646):

Much wonder is made of the Baromez, that strange plant-animal or vegetable Lamb of Tartary, which Wolves delight to feed on, which hath the shape of a Lamb, affordeth a bloody juyce upon breaking, and liveth while the plants be consumed about it.

Other monsters are made up by combining various kinds of animals; the Barometz is a union of animal and vegetable kingdoms.
This brings to mind the mandrake, which cries out like a man when it is ripped from the earth; and in one of the circles of the Inferno, the sad forest of the suicides, from whose torn limbs blood and words drip at the same time; and that tree dreamed by Chesterton, which devoured the birds nesting in its branches, and when spring came put out feathers instead of leaves.”

Jorge Luis Borges: The Book of Imaginary Beings