Greetings people! (and others)
This week, we start a new regular feature on the Hopeless, Vendetta- TALES FROM THE SQUID AND TEAPOT. You will find this here every Tuesday. This column is written by the greatly esteemed Martin Pearson and we are proud and massively chuffed to bring him to the island and then, to you. So, without further ado, we give you the first tale…
When W.S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan) went to America in 1871 he was invited to visit the island of Hopeless. He reputedly spent a night in the Squid and Teapot and the experience gave him the idea for an operetta. Sadly this was never completed. If it had it would have been his first collaboration with Arthur Sullivan. As it is, only a tiny fragment of the libretto survives. This song, possibly incomplete, is almost certainly based upon Gilbert witnessing the mysterious spoonwalkers at first hand.
When you wake in the night
With your chest feeling tight
And sweat dripping down on the bedding.
You might fervently pray
You were far, far away,
In Timbuctoo, Bombay or Reading.
Then despite all your prayers
There’s a noise on the stairs
You know that your night’s not improving.
For that ominous clink
Makes one long for a drink,
It’s the sound of the cutlery moving.
Oh that ominous clink
Makes one long for a drink.
It’s the sound of the cutlery moving.
When the cutlery drawer
Isn’t quite as before,
And the spoons have all left without reason
You might think that the maid
Had somehow betrayed
All the trust you’d allowed her this season.
But you know in your heart
This is only the start
And the knowledge is really unsoothing,
For a spoon has no leg,
So the question I beg
Is “How is the cutlery moving?”
Oh a spoon has no leg,
So the question I beg
Is “How is the cutlery moving?”
What unholy sort
Is forced to resort
To stealing my spoons for prosthetics?
Do they need every one
To furnish their fun
And indulge in demonic athletics?
How I wish they’d depart,
It would lighten my heart.
They can keep all my spoons, thereby proving
That I’m terribly scared
And never prepared
To hear that dash’d cutlery moving.
Oh I’m terribly scared
And never prepared
To hear that dash’d cutlery moving.
I can amply sympathise since I have a picture of a spoonwalker right at the end of my bed, at night the picture is strangely empty and often I hear from the kitchen downstairs the chilling sound of stirring cutlery, klink klink tinkle, klinkle tink……