Sleep Hygiene, Night Starvation

I had never heard the phrase 'sleep hygiene' before last night, when I heard it twice - once on the radio and once on TV - within ten minutes. It's got nothing to do with cleanliness but is about arranging matters so as to get a good night's sleep - saying no to that third espresso, drawing the curtains, turning off the light and the TV, that kind of thing. It reminded me of a phrase from the now distant past that I had all but forgotten - 'night starvation'. This non-existent condition was dreamt up in the 1930s to market Horlicks, a sweet malty milk drink that is still available in various forms today. The notion of 'night starvation' caught on, and was still going strong in my childhood. I remember ads in the women's magazines that made up rather too much of my boyhood reading in which a worried housewife, who, despite sleeping well, was feeling tired all the time, consulted her doctor about it. This reassuring figure, in a pinstripe suit, would remove his glasses and suggest that 'You may be suffering from night starvation'. To remedy this, he would recommend - you guessed? - Horlicks. They don't make them like that any more (they're not allowed to) - but why did the notion of 'night starvation' take such a hold? I fancy it was because it sounded faintly alarming (and yet easily remedied), and because in those days of non-stop eating, it seemed barely credible that the human frame could survive the hours between the late supper and the cooked breakfast without further nourishment.

Sensational Reader Offer

The endless coverage of the latest spot of Tory fund-raising bother over the weekend has given me an idea...

I'm sure you will appreciate that running Nigeness doesn't come cheap (you wouldn't believe the amount of fuel the legendary NigeCorp turbine hall alone consumes). Now you, dear reader, can help to keep Nigeness humming along at the top of its game [You call this the top? - Ed.] by making a donation, large or small (cash only please, for administrative reasons). Here's how it will work:

£5 will buy you not only the right to post a comment, but a personal Guarantee that it will not be deleted. Terms and conditions apply.
£20 will guarantee you a personal response to your comment (no minimum length guaranteed).
£50 will secure you a place on a guided tour of NigeCorp HQ.(Note: These tours will not be guided by me.)
£200 will secure you a personal guided tour of NigeCorp HQ, guided by me in person. (Minimum length of tour not guaranteed.)
£500 will secure you a visit to my personal penthouse apartment at NigeCorp HQ. (Minimum length of visit not guaranteed.)
£1,000 will guarantee that I'll be there when you visit. Terms and conditions apply.
£2,500 will secure you afternoon tea in said apartment, with me, in person. (No guaranteed maximum number of other guests.)
£5,000 will secure you a place at NigeCorp's legendary boardroom table, giving you the chance to offer your own input into the future direction and vision of NigeCorp and to shape Nigeness policy on matters important to you.

I'm sure you will agree that this represents excellent value for money, and a visionary way forward for Nigeness. Dig deep!

Again

I see my epoch-making post on Hoffnung has sprung back to life again over on the Dabbler.

Wilfrid Brambell: 'Openly derogatory of New Zealand cathedrals'

Had he been spared, the actor Wilfrid Brambell - best remembered as the repulsive, wheedling 'dirty old man' in Steptoe & Son, a sitcom almost too excruciating to watch - would have been 100 today. He arrived at the Steptoe part by way of various early turns as 'old man in pub', 'drunk', 'tramp', etc, playing way above his actual age. In 1965, declaring he didn't want to do any more Steptoe, he crossed to New York and opened on Broadway in a musical called Kelly, which closed after one performance.
Kelly is one of the most notorious Broadway flops - a musical written and produced by a team with no musical theatre experience at all, and inspired by the story of a man who, in the 1880s, claimed to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and survived (a feat later attributed, by Allen Ginsberg, to Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs, though the jump he survived was actually from the Manhattan Bridge). In the musical, a daredevil busboy named Hop Kelly falls foul of Bowery gamblers who aim to prevent him surviving the jump so they can win a bet. Even last-minute script doctoring by Mel Brooks and others couldn't save this oven-ready turkey.
To return to Brambell, among his more surprising works was a 1971 single, Time Marches On, in which, speaking over a guitar riff, he laments the demise of The Beatles (with whom he starred in a Hard Day's Night). On the B-side he sings a topical song about Britain's adoption of the decimal currency, The Decimal Song. Still more surprising was Brambell's casting in Frank Zappa's surreal documentary 200 Motels, in which he was due to play the Mothers of Invention bassist Jeff Simmons. However, Wilfrid walked out on Frank in a rage over something or other, and Zappa decided to give the role to the next person to walk into the room - who turned out to be Ringo Starr's chauffeur, Martin Lickert.
A 'closet' gay in the manner of the time - which seemed to involve pouncing on any passing young man, a la Frankie Howerd - Brambell was also an alcoholic, and always liable to end up in a scrape. According to Wikipedia, while on tour Down Under with the Steptoe & Son stage show, he 'used bad language and was openly derogatory of New Zealand cathedrals in an interview'. New Zealand cathedrals, eh? What can he possibly have said?
My landlady in Sheffield (in the early Seventies) recalled having Wilfrid Brambell as a paying guest once when he was on tour. He spent most of his time getting drunk and chasing young men in the town centre. She did not speak well of him.

Aspirin: The Devil's Horns Effect

The latest good news on Aspirin comes as no great surprise to those of us who have been extolling the virtues of this medicine-cabinet marvel for many years. What does continue to surprise me is the apparently ever-strengthening resistance to Aspirin. It's getting increasingly hard to find it on pharmacy and supermarket shelves, where it's being elbowed aside by ever more fancily packaged variants on Paracetamol and Ibuprofen. Neither of these two, in my experience, is as effective a painkiller as Aspirin (especially in combination with Codeine) and neither is any safer - certainly not Paracetamol, which is very bad news for the liver. And yet Paracetamol is seen as safe, nice and cuddly. It's what marketing types call the Halo Effect - an often wholly undeserved aura of health-giving beneficence that surrounds certain products or foods. Aspirin, by contrast, has something more like the Devil's Horns Effect - an undeserved reputation for being harmful and bad (based on the idea that it will make your stomach bleed - though you'd be very unlucky indeed if it did). The Devil's Horns Effect will no doubt trump the health benefits of Aspirin yet again - especially, I fancy, among women, who by and large seem to have a mighty down on Aspirin (or so I've found). And of course the producers and retailers have little interest in pushing Aspirin, as there's no money to be made from it, even if sales now soar. As they should. But won't.

The Big Day

Today is World Poetry Day, and here at NigeCorp we're very excited indeed. I am wearing my best chiton in honour of the occasion and am just putting the finishing touches to this year's Pindaric ode to Euterpe (I'm having a little trouble with the antistrophe - you know how it is). At the appointed hour, I shall don the laurel crown, rise to my feet and, while my devoted deputy smites the lyre, I shall declaim. Libations will then be poured, and if it goes anything like as well as last year, success is guaranteed.
It's also World Puppetry Day, but let's not go there...

Harry Hole and the Lynches

I'm afraid (no I'm not, I'm intensely relaxed about it) that the vogue for Scandinavian detective fiction has largely passed me by. I saw some of the English-language Wallanders, which had much to commend them, even if the plots were barely more plausible than Midsomer Murders, generally revolving around massive conspiracies, cover-ups and corruption involving almost all the dramatis personae. I also rather enjoyed the American version of The Killing, much of which was, I gather, a straight steal from the original, but with a different ending. Once I even had a stab at reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but retired hurt after a few pages. Now I learn (via a poster on Victoria station) that one of the biggest sellers, the Norwegian Jo Nesbo, writes novels about a detective called Harry Hole. Harry Hole? What kind of name is that for a detective? Imagine if Conan Doyle or Raymond Chandler has opted for Harrry Hole. - would they have found a readership? Anyway, Mr Hole, the hero of nine novels so far, has his own Wikipedia entry, one that reads almost like a caricature of the troubled Scandinavian detective (has anyone written a parody of this genre yet? They should.) We learn that he lost his mother - 'a descendant of the Sami people' - to cancer when he was in his 20s, and has never had a close relationship with his father. His younger sister has Down's syndrome. And he is of course both a heavy smoker and an alcoholic. Somehow reading Hole's profile put me in mind of the unfortunate Lynch family in Samuel Beckett's Watt:
'There was Tom Lynch, widower, aged eighty-five years, confined to his bed with constant undiagnosed pains in the caecum, and his three surviving boys Joe, aged sixty-five years, a rheumatic cripple, and Jim, aged sixty-four years, a hunchbacked inebriate, and Bill, widower, aged sixty-three years, greatly hampered in his movements by the loss of both legs as the result of a slip, followed by a fall, and his only surviving daughter May Sharpe, widow, aged sixty-two years, in full possession of all her faculties with the exception of that of vision. Then there was Joe's wife née Doyly-Byrne, aged sixty-five years, a sufferer from Parkinson's palsy but otherwise very fit and well, and Jim's wife Kate née Sharpe aged sixty-four years, covered all over with running sores of an unidentified nature but otherwise fit and well. Then there was Joe's boy Tom aged forty-one years, unfortunately subject alternately to fits of exaltation, which rendered him incapable of the least exertion, and of depression, during which he could stir neither hand nor foot, and Bill's boy Sam, aged forty years, paralysed by a merciful providence from no higher than the knees down and from no lower than the waist up, and May's spinster daughter Ann, aged thirty-nine years, greatly reduced in health and spirits by a painful congenital disorder of an unmentionable kind, and Jim's lad Jack aged thirty-eight years, who was weak in the head, and the boon twins Art and Con aged thirty-seven years, who measured in height when in their stockinged feet three feet and four inches and who weighed in weight when stripped to the buff seventy-one pounds all bone and sinew and between whom the resemblance was so marked in every way that even those (and they were many) who knew and loved them most would call Art Con when they meant Art, and Con Art when they meant Con, as least as often as, if not more often than, they called Art Art when they meant Art, and Con Con when they meant Con. And then there was young Tom's wife Magnee Sharpe aged forty-one years, greatly handicapped in her house and outdoor activity by sub-epileptic seizures of monthly incidence, during which she rolled foaming on the floor or on the yard, or on the vegetable patch, or on the river's brim, and seldom failed to damage herself in one way or another, so that she was obliged to go to bed, and remain there, every month, until she was better, and Sam's wife Liz nee Sharpe, aged thirty-eight years, fortunate in being more dead than alive as a result of having in the course of twenty years given Sam nineteen children, of whom four survived, and again expecting, and poor Jack who it will be remembered was weak in the head his wife Lil née Sharpe aged thirty-eight years, who was weak in the chest..'