Lists

As it's a feverish time of year for lists - presents to buy, 22 ingredients to stuff into a bird's bottom etc - I thought I'd add to the collection by compiling my own list. It's a favourites of the week effort and counts as a list because it has two items.

1) Tim Sanders pocket cartoon, sited at the Political Cartoon of the Year Awards at the Political Cartoon Gallery. Two glamorous girls wearing little slips of dresses stand at a bar, holding a newspaper saying 'Arrested Tory - Row Continues'. One girl comments "Mind you a lot of these MPs like being handcuffed." Well it's probably just my age and the fact it reminds me of the Tory tradition of sex scandals.

Sanders offering was positively sweet compared to Peter Brookes' take on Lucian Freud's 'Benefits Supervisor Sleeping'. Gordon Brown has been substituted for the benefits supervisor and appears to be decomposing, his skin has a creme de menthe glow and seems to be melting into the shabby velveteen sofa. My sympathies are with the benefits supervisor who is really rather attractive. I can't remember her name but she gave a very good interview to John Humphries on the Today show which is more than most people can manage.

2) Eunoia by Christian Bok which is pretty much a pocket sized book to go with Sanders' pocket cartoon. Eunoia is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels and means 'beautiful thinking' even though it sounds like a complaint which renders you unable to speak clearly (there'll be a lot of that about over the next few weeks - no, I did not say 'Here comes the psychotic who has ruined every family Christmas for the past decade' I said 'How lovely to see Uncle Cyril and looking so well too'.)

Back to Bok's book - it contains five chapters and in each only one vowel is used - only A in chapter A and so on. The resulting verbal gymnastics are amazing and often beautiful too. Here's a very topical snatch from chapter A:

"Hassan can watch, aghast, as databanks at NASDAQ graph hard data and chart a NASDAQ crash - a sharp fall that alarms staff at a Manhattan bank. Hassan acts fast, ransacks cashbags at a mad dash, and grabs what bank drafts a bank branch at Casablanca can cash: marks, rands and bahts."

Clever or what? Or: Clever we feel, we reel, ejected, expelled then defected. Oh give up woman and return to the stuffing.