Squilby de Reujeurs
Unlike the majority of other buffoons, Squilby has had the very good fortune of being born to two pairs of parents, one a quiet, unassuming couple who reside at Bournemouth, the others, a respectable upper-class couple who are members of the Bosnian aristocracy (more so than most: their family were members of the Bosnian aristocracy even before the formation of Bosnia as a separate territory.)
Squilby is a quiet buffoon who enjoys the simple pleasures: the wearing of Trilbys during elevenses; Kippers, during the summer months; and the sound of a Parry cantata through a sun-room window.
He dines, every evening at a quarter past five, on a single page from Foxe's Booke of Martyrs.
Richard & Co & Co
Sir Richard & Co & Co had the misfortune to be born and bred into a family that lacked fame, fortune, or even a title. Neither of his parents were present at his birth, having a pressing engagement at a cocktail party some miles away; shortly thereafter their being informed of his coming into the world, he was sent to a boarding school.
He likes long lisps on the beach, the colour the evening sun makes on tweed, and has masqueraded as a snifter at several exclusive MI5 shindigs.
He currently resides as Live-In Decadent and carnation sorter in the house next to yours.
Auberon Augh
Being an adventurous sort of buffoon, Auberon Augh ran away from home at the age of seven to take up a moving life of scholarship and adventure with a travelling college of prefects, headmasters and boarders. For the next three years, he learnt the essential arts of being a gentleman, viz: applying quadratic equations whilst stranded in the Antarctic, the appropriate use of Andrew Marvell couplets whilst battling the Hun; and the elite sport of spurtle tossing.
He has a defiantly skittish mind, and frequently enjoys a diffidence of opinion with his friends. He prefers enemas to enemies. He voted faithfully for the Tories until he was 18 years of age.
If you wish to contact Auberon, he communicates solely by semaphore messages taken by carrier pigeons to his house on every second Friday of every fifth month of the year.
Sir Bluestoak Roglan
Only the finer things of life for Sir Bluestoak: bathing in liquid silk, snuff in both his ears, twice daily; and vespers sung by a choir of Italian-trained beagles. He is something of a decadent, and enjoys having secret feelings for vestibules during his Aunt's long dinners, and signing income tax returns in a louche manner. To this day, he sleeps with his fob-watch nesting happily at his feet.
Sir Bluestoak, 23 years of age until next lunar eclipse, seeks a woman to enjoy a brief, shameful relationship, broken by sudden illicit liasons with ruffles and unexplained spasms of crying to Margaret Lockwood movies. Enclose a stamped sealed envelope addressed to him in a stamped sealed envelope addressed to yourself in a stamped sealed envelope addressed to your postmaster (or vice versa, dependent on the circumstances) and await the results.
Willicent Idge
A humble buffoon from a lowly background, Willicent Idge confesses to harbouring Freudian complexes about red sandstone buildings, and enjoying the taste of badger kidneys. He enjoys the simple things: holding hands with his butler; regular attendances at the opening of the outer door of Tate Museum; wearing the fine scent of tobacco to meetings of the British Anti-Smoking League; and the sensation of squalor on long weekends (if someone is willing to share it with him.)
He may be reached by Telegraph, Mail, Telephone, or a family connection with your aunt's sister's niece's daughter-in-law's African grey parrot.
Sir Fauntleroy Upsner
Sir Fauntleroy is considered an exquisite example of British upper-class flapdoodle. He is much too exclusive for anyone, including you, and certainly himself. As a result, he vacated his body several years previously, leaving a supercilious sneer and a haughty flick of the fingers to take care of the premises in his absence.
He has taken up employment as a Gainsborough painting, although doubts have been cast upon his authenticity by several prominent critics.
Berberington Smythe
A hopelessly mixed up buffoon with some unusual talents, Berberington Smythe absent-mindedly created the steam train several years before he thought of the idea for it and drew the plans. (He put it to use as a mechanical sorter for his bookshelves.)
Other achievements of his include:
- During a stint exploring the Gobi Desert, he accidentally reinvented the water wheel;
- Setting out to discover Newton's law of gravity (in order to use it as a paperweight in his office) he instead accidentally redefined several universal constants, which caused no end of consternation among the nation's top scientists;
- In attempting to weigh an elephant with a rudimentary device involving a thimble, a rubber band, and two uneven-sized pins, he accidentally reinvented the catapult, and started a war between two French principalities in Africa and the Pacific Islands, respectively.
If you wish to contact Sir Berberington Smythe, set in a letter of complaint to your local newspaper written entirely in Portuguese, await the instructions in the following edition, published in a coded version of Swahili, and remember to take your pistol with you: where you're going, you may need it.
25 comments:
Foolish me, I was imagining non-flamboyantly-homosexual buffoons. I must have temporarily forgotten whose blog this is.
They are all rather camp, aren't they? All this decadent this and lisp that and louche what have you.
Oh no, you'd only notice it if you were really looking.
I used the word louche because I read it somewhere and wanted to use it. All the rest of the stuff about carnation sorting and sunlight on tweed was just nonsense for musical effect.
And your first comment is baffling, but I suspect you're having a go at my homophobia and/or my masculine sense of performativity.
No, I don't know what a masculine sense of performativity is either.
So what's the difference between a buffoon, a dandy and a fop?
I'm suspicious of the chaps who have only submitted drawings of themselves.
How do I know they're not old drawings?
Willicent Idge is the buffoon for me. It's the spats. They do it for me every time.
Tim - it depends if you're asking a buffoon, a dandy, or a fop. Doubtless the difference is very small, and very very important.
Jo, a very good point. Perhaps check their cocktails to see if they have a fine coating of dust on them??
Alexis - and for a humble buffoon, he certainly does seem to have amassed a large portion of worldly wealth.
I'm off now to check the meaning of 'spats' in Macquarie Dictionary...
Worldly wealth, schmorldly wealth. Spats (I mention just in case the MacQ fails you) are those ornamental white fabric shoe cover jobbies.
This is a very sustained piece of silliness, young Timothy, and must have taken some time to finish.
It reminds rather of Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns, but it is very disturbing to think they may have aired before you were born....(Just how old are you, approximately?)
I agree with Steve. Top piece of writing, Mr T. I meant to say that earlier.
29, but the Ripping Yarns are repeated on the ABC every so often. There's plenty of the Nonsense genre in English culture to draw from, thankfully. I had Mervyn Peake's poetry faintly in mind while writing.
Did I hit a nerve or something? I was thinking of my earlier comments about rich fools, not having a go at you.
Also, masculine sense of performativity? Are you channelling Glen Fuller or something? Please don’t, one of him is more than enough.
P.S. When do my comments ever make that much sense anyway?
Tim (the other one), a buffoon is a fool, a dandy is a bit too interested in his appearance, a fop is a dandy gone a step too far. FOr my money it's the dandy who will get the most annoyed is you mislabel him.
Late night crankiness. And the delicate male ego. And my own wilful peevishness. Who's Glen Fuller?
Hmmm.
Glen Fuller has a blog called Event Mechanics. He makes the least sense of anyone I've never met or I'm simply too stupid to understand anything he says - I'm not sure. However, if he didn't invent the phrase masculine sense of performativity it is something he would use and then write a three million word essay. Other than that I really have no idea who Glen Fuller is. Mark knows but I don't trust his judgement.
Oh yes, I remember seeing a post he did about the Nascar and for a while had in mind a send up of it - not too different from this style of post, actually.
Do you send everyone up? I've suddenly gotten very paranoid.
Spat, short for Spatterdash (a word sadly slipped from the common lexicon). The cloth things that go over your boots and under your trousers - so your man doesn't have to polish your shoes that often. I saw a chap in spats the other day - damned if I could tell if he was a fop, dandy, whoopise, patsy or pimp.
There goes the neighbourhood.
Well, spatterdash it all, it's Nottlesby! Live and let live, Nottlesby, I suppose - though I sometimes feel as if the purpose of fashion should be to let people disappear than to make them stand out. One thinks of the Fitzroid-chaps who think they are fashionable by wearing hats in pubs, whereas it really makes them look silly. (*Sniffs he, in the manner of a snobbish conservative*)
No. Seriously, I'm in no position to make fashion judgments, but still.
Nails, I hope so. Only parodying some people would be malicious. Actually, it's always a tough decision - be polite, or be satirical? It's not a question of who deserves to be satirised (the whole point is to satirise pomposity and hypocrisy and vice, not to be an example of it)
OK, OK - now I've got you on the syllabus without question. Timt, you have the honour of being my star "trigger" for Term 4 Satire, its purposes, targets, potential for backfiring etc. Triumph.
I'm always fond of a bit of performativity of the masculine, feminine and definitely of the androgine. Does anyone else have a weakness for Eddie Izzard? Men in makeup and tailored trousers ... speaking french ... ohhh ... fetch my smelling salts!
I am honoured to be the Term 4 trigger.
Satyrs, as you know, are another androgonite creature and therefore this whole thread ties up quite nicely. I wouldn't know about this whole men in makeup and tailored trousers are attractive thing (I always thought it was more for the amusement value?). Although the vice versa of that, women in traditional male clothes, is undoubtedly attractive. w
(Incidentally, I've always liked the whole Amazon tradition in many collection of myths. I don't know where it comes from, and whether it's meant to be fantastic or nonsensical, or whether it indicates a historical phenomenon. But it's interesting.)
More of an hysterical phenomenon.
Men in tailored trousers and make-up can be dead sexy. Depends on the man, and the trousers, and the make-up...
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