The UK...

is a funny old place, with some funny place names. I am wont on occasion to ponder this fact, mainly whilst driving in the countryside. As I understand it most place names go back to Anglo Saxon times, or when the Vikings were using this place as a larder, or that time the Roman's got offended because we were mainly painted blue. Either way some place names are, well, interesting. Only last week I was driving in Cheshire toward a hamlet called Little Pigmeat, just along from Garnish which was beyond Heavily Pregnant. I passed many an old bloke dressed in hessian with XXX printed on the chest and chewing some stalk or other. Oddly they all seemed to be called Jacob except the one called Nebudchadnezzer though I suspect he was showing off. It looked to me like they'd been hired from Gnarlies R US because no one dresses like that anymore what with hessian being so last year. They were strategically placed on country lanes leaning over gates, sitting on hay bales, polishing churns, oiling mink, and they were so ruddy, and only had three front teeth, which of course were crooked. Talk about your stereotypes. When I go to the country I want authenticity not some Ad Exec's idea of rural. And those village names, Throat, Strange Bicep, Heavy Thigh what is that all about? Two rivers, the Merkin and Pudendum meet beneath a crossroads with one of those wonderful fiveway signs that direct the traveller to Region, Nether Region, Myitisdampdownthere, Infection and It'lltakemorethanacourseofantibioticstoclearthatup.

In Manchester there's no romance when it comes to names just the brutal practicality of city life, no iffing no messing just call it like it is which is why I live in Crap. But amongst rolling fields, copses, hedgerows, pasture, the song of water rippling over smooth stones it is possible to feel closer to nature, to Ghia. So I stopped for birdsong that could just be heard over the noise of tractors spraying shit. A very slow moving truck passed and on the rear flat bed were lines of old fellers all dressed in sacking and murmuring about how fine the weather was and how good the harvest would be if they could just entice their waster son Jethro back from the city, some were calling for a return to capital punishment, not for anything in particular, they were just calling for its return. If you've ever seen those bollards they put down on motorways to close off lanes, a lorry drives and men (hey, it's technical work) drop bollards one after another, well it was somewhat like that. At key points they'd unload an old guy and not even halt the vehicle. I was later told that lead boots served to both stop them from tipping over and wandering off. All in all a pretty slick operation, organised by a city firm of course, well you can't entrust the countryside to those who live there, they'd only mess it up.