A malfunctioning cash register inadvertently brought us some good advice with this morning’s cup of java lava. They should set this up as a proper service.

Thanks to Uncle Luc for the photo!

Source: Wikimedia Commons

What do you put on the homepage of a website about everything ever?

Wikipedia, the oracle of online omniscience, answers this question beautifully with a daily plucking from its vast repertoire of content.

With a snappy summary and an intriguing image, you’re up and away on a digital magic carpet, skimming over the fascinating landscapes of Esoterica.

However, today’s selection was an unexpected source of mirth this morning:

Fanny scratching in 18th-century London’s Cock Lane was so notorious that interested bystanders often blocked the street … Fanny scratching eventually resulted in several prosecutions, and the pillorying of a father

At first I had this pegged for the last revenge of a disgruntled Wikipedia editor. Then I clocked the date. An April Fools Day joke masquerading as a fascinating tale of pre-Victorian squalor.

She is not amused.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Victorians themselves would never have got the joke. We English are often reminded today that those same Victorians deserve most of the credit for our sexually-repressed English sense of humour.

The 2007 edition of Let’s Go Western Europe, an anglophone backpackers’ bible, attempts to prepare non-British readers for a visit to Britain with a bit of background.

Summing up the culture and history of a whole nation in a couple of paragraphs was never going to be a backpack in the park, but Let’s Go gamefully wades in, describing the English sense of humour as “raunchy” and therefore somewhat at odds with the popular impression of “English reserve” held abroad.

If this is actually true, it was not always thus. Indeed Victorian Britain abhorred raunch. English humour during Queen Vic’s reign was much broader than the claustrophobic, organ-fixated morals and manners of our own times. In a rare Daily Mail article (‘rare’ inasmuch as it is actually quite good), AN Wilson describes the kind of content one finds in a Victorian jokebook:

Marry a woman with a wooden leg. When you want a spree, steal the leg, she can’t run after you!

Quite. Beyond the Victorians, Wilson delves deeper into the bargain bin and comes up with Shakespeare and Chaucer: fertile ground, as John Sutherland notes in The Guardian, for richer and far ruder treasures.

With decorous dialogues and sparkling soliloquies, Shakespeare’s poetry and prose often soared high. Bawdy bard that he was however, occasionally it would also swoop very low indeed:

I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain,
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain…

— Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

Meanwhile Chaucer’s responsibility for rudeness is aggravated by the paucity of contemporary works for comparison, together with his status and singularity in English literature.

Derk was the nyght as pich, or as the cole,
And at the wyndow out she putte hir hole,
And absolon, hym fil no bet ne wers,
But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers
Ful savourly, er he were war of this.

— Chaucer, Miller’s Tale

Were he here to answer to the charge of excellence in picturesque smut, Chaucer’s excuse in The Canterbury Tales might be that his characters – his Miller, Reeve and Wife of Bath – are doing the talking. Moreover, they’re only treading the well-worn pilgrim’s path of a literary genre called fabliau in which a certain degree of filth was expected and even encouraged.

Today, both Shakespeare and Chaucer are of course required reading on the syllabus of every schoolkid in Britain. Say no more.

When I was a kid I graduated from paper rounds to a part-time job in a supermarket. If you took a few moments’ time out from sorting the soups from the baked beans, you could learn a thing or two about life.

I stocked up so much material during my two-year stint that I seriously considered writing a modern day Canterbury Tales set in a branch of Tesco.

Some people moan that Christmas starts earlier every year, almost at the end of November. Not supermarket workers. They know that Christmas paraphernalia is piled up in an enormous warehouse outside some town in Cheshire until mid-August.

That’s when it ships out to the stores where it remains in a dark corner until the last days of September. Occasionally a member of staff might pass by and hear the faint sound of a Santa doll packed deep in a cardboard box, playing jingle bells until the unbranded battery runs out.

The majority of those people – the early Christmas moaners – they’ll still pucker up and start early, buying their jars of mincemeat and their half-price value packs of recycled, charity greetings cards in November. Or, like J and I, they’ll make a pact with their nearest and dearest not to spend pots of money on gifts. But we go further than that. We renounce all pressies for ourselves.

Rather than being an honourable resolution, this is regrettably the point every year where we enter a state of Gift War.

Gift War is like the Cold War only it happens at home. We decorate our tree with modesty and restraint and we stand back and we admire it. Next day, I feel like taking another self-congratulatory look at our handiwork and – to my horror – there’s a stack of beautifully wrapped little presents on one side of the tree.

I feel a flash of anger. I’m annoyed at myself and I’m no longer thinking about our erstwhile pact. I’ve got nothing for J and there are only a few days until Christmas.

I have to go one bigger and one better. I find a good-sized, boxed gift and I have the shop wrap it. I smugly head for home to counterbalance the tree with it. When I get there all rosy-cheeked, she’s put more neat little packages on her side. My nice box is no longer sufficient. The gift race – the building up, the stockpiling of presents on either side of the tree – this goes on right until the shops close on Christmas Eve, without a hint of perestroika.

Then Christmas Day finally comes. The hostilities cease. We sit on the floor, either side of the tree, and laugh at how we broke our pact yet again. And we have a sherry and we forget about the mad month we’ve had, racking our brains for new ideas, running around the shops, hiding stuff in silly places.

We forget at least until the following October, anyway.

Ashton’s speech today in Strasbourg – on the External Action Service – was just too much and I’m not talking about her proposals.

It’s rather that I’m not sure I can stomach the rollout of another new outfit. As Ashton’s star rises, the palatability of her personal style plummets.

So far, I’ve been unable to work out who’s responsible for these outrages but I’m keeping a close eye on the situation.

Below you’ll find my Fashtonometer, a scale that I’ve thrown together to enable me to measure the status of each new abomination:

Catherine Ashton’s dress sense should give all Member States cause for concern and is, I believe, a strong candidate for regulation at the European level.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I was surprised to learn that my home country – the United Kingdom – consumes more chocolate per person per year than Belgium. Moreover, Switzerland beats both countries by a handsome margin.

Nevertheless, Belgian chocolate could well be the finest in the world. Certainly, people here take it very seriously indeed.

In Brussels, where chocolate is the flag symbol of a sophisticated epicurean culture that frankly embarasses the provincial country folk, it’s a religion. And I’ve listened to several lengthy sermons about certain boutiques, hastily delivered from a palatal pulpit in the familiar rattle-tattle of Bruxellois French.

“[M]y very raison d’être is to offer you a dream,” says megastar chocolatier Pierre Marcolini on his website. “My need to challenge conventions, question what I do and break new ground,” he continues, “led to the creation of these chocolate squares that weigh barely six grams…”

Pierre Marcolini is a highly visible individual in what has traditionally been a business of long-established family names, each of which are cited reverently in a near-heraldic hierarchy of chocolastic excellence.

Like evening rain on the cobbles, Marcolini’s creations reflect an image in miniature of this city: a captive market of outwardly conservative, inwardly libertine lawyers, politicians and commissioners.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

For we foreigners, mere inquisitive guests at the banquet table of complex confection, this art can be difficult to appreciate, let alone afford.

That’s why I have to forgive J when, from the city of chocolate, she sometimes returns home with a box of Ferrero Rocher.

Ferrero Rocher have always been, to quote a pleasantly candid Wikipedia article, “promoted to a down-market audience as an aspirational brand”.

But for less than the cost of a third class fare with air-conditioning from Pune to Jaipur (1,302km for R1,087/€15.60, fact fans), a big box of Ferrero Rochers goes very well with that other expat essential, Taylor’s Yorkshire Tea (decaffeinated, of course).

Ah, now you’re talking: simple pleasures for simple people.

So just in case you’ve forgotten since you became a busy, working adult, here’s a quick reminder of how to wash your hands, courtesy of the brilliantly-named Medical and Psychosocial Interventions Service:

Opponents of the European Union are fond of pointing out what they see as the three grand negatives: democratic deficit, lack of transparency and unwieldy bureaucracy.

Brussels certainly doesn’t do itself any favours with the famously poor quality of its communications, particularly when it makes the occasional, but always highly visible foot-in-mouth blunder.

Take the banner above, seen recently on the Charlemagne Building next to Rue de la Loi-Wetstraat. Announcing the EU’s Sustainable Energy Week, it looks inocuous enough from a distance, but these are the people who brought us Entropa.

Detractors who perceive the European process as expensive, bureaucratic and agonisingly slow need simply take a closer look:

Twist the words of this strapline and you have all the ammunition you need!

Show as slideshow

Entropa

Key to the countries

To compare the picture with the information below, you might want to open the first thumbnail link in a new tab or window.

1. United Kingdom
   • Conspicuous by its absence is the most sceptical of sceptic member states
2. Finland
   • A hunter dreams of big game on a wooden floor
3. The Netherlands
   • Only minarets poke out from a land that has been reclaimed by the sea
4. France
   • This nation has declared a general “Strike!”
5. Cyprus
   • Split in two with a saw
6. Germany
   • Motorways completely fill the landscape, criss-crossing in a possibly controversial pattern
7. Belgium
   • The half-empty box of chocolates
8. Romania
   • Trading off the fame of Dracula with a gaudy theme park
9. Latvia
   • A pancake-flat landscape mistakenly filled with mountains
10. Italy
    • Pleasuring themselves with their footballs, these players take their love of the game rather too literally
11. Malta
    • So small, you need a magnifying glass to see it
12. Slovakia
    • A sausage all wrapped and bound up with string the colours of the Hungarian flag
13. Hungary
    • Agricultural atomium of simple fruit and vegetables
14. Greece
    • Fires sweeping across a troubled landscape
15. Poland
    • Priests raising their rainbow flag in a potato field
16. Luxembourg
    • A little gold nugget that’s always for sale
17. Sweden
    • Flat packed furniture
18. Slovenia
    • A carved plaque to remind visitors that other visitors have visited here
19. Bulgaria
    • A collection of ‘Turkish’ squat toilets, here covered by a black sheet due to national sensitivities
20. Estonia
    • Power tools whose design shows a distinct Communist influence
21. Portugal
    • Raw, red meat in colony-shaped pieces
22. Spain
    • All steel and concrete, this whole place is a building site
23. Lithuania
    • Putti urinating happily over the borderline
24. Denmark
    • A shape built out of Lego bricks, possibly resembling a certain cartoon
25. Ireland
    • A swampy bog of bagpipes
26. Austria
    • Cooling towers for the nuclear-phobic
27. Czech Republic
    • An electronic board of controversial quotes from the host nation’s eurosceptic President

Reactions to Entropa

Here in Brussels, people seemed to be more bothered by Černý’s hoodwinking of the Czech authorities than by the import of the work itself.

There was talk of removing the whole piece because the artist had failed to satisfy the terms of the commission, which required “international collaboration”. Černý actually produced the work himself together with two colleagues.

“We wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself” the artist told the BBC when the work was first displayed.

Entropa certainly takes a humorous look at each member state, but it does so inconsistently. Britain’s non-appearance will make many Britons proud! Meanwhile Belgium gets off pretty lightly with its half-eaten, half-empty box of chocolates, whereas the allusion to Bulgaria is somewhat more frank in its display of squat toilets.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

What was far more interesting than Entropa itself was the position in which it put the Presidency and its spokesman, the occasionally gaffe-prone Karel Schwarzenberg.

If the work stayed in place, it would continue both to aggrieve those member states who were upset by their portrayal and to embarass the Czech Presidency.

If the work was removed, it would come off like sour grapes and no-one would take the ‘breach of contract’ reason seriously in the face of more vocal complaints flowing from Bulgaria (those toilets!) and Slovakia (a sausage wrapped in Hungarian-coloured string).

The great European compromise

The eventual compromise reached was predictably European. The effigy of Bulgaria was covered by a black sheet, as can be seen in the image above.

As it turns out, then, the enduring question will not be whether Entropa should stay, but rather whether or not it is good art.