In that piece, I promised to follow up the “bumps incident” in a further Ogblog piece, but subsequently that idea got mislaid amongst other musings and postings.
For those who don’t like clicking and/or object to Facebook, the following quote are Paul’s words on the matter:
Ian, with your recent birthday I thought of this legendary photograph of the ‘bumps’. However, with our advancing years it’s time to leave the school quad and visit pastures new.
[Several doctored versions of the above picture are displayed]
Which one appeals?
Thank you, Paul, for reminding me to write up the original incident. The time of year is apposite. It would have been around this time of year, I suspect September 1976.
My recollection is that we had witnessed somebody being given the bumps on their birthday; that was the tradition at our school and no doubt at many other schools past, present (even in these heath & safety, socially distancing, snowflakey times) and future.
Unfortunately, I chose to volunteer the information that, as my birthday takes place towards the end of the school summer holidays, I had always been spared the ritual humiliation of receiving the bumps.
Me & My Big Mouth
Some 44 years later, I still have not mastered the art of keeping my mouth shut when it really matters. But I have got a bit better at that art. The bumps incident, so brilliantly recorded for posterity by an (as yet) uncredited photographer, was one of many salutary lessons.
There’s a lot to like about the headline photograph. Paul Deacon seems hardly able to manage my weight in the matter of deploying the bumps, Paul’s growth spurt arriving a bit later than most of ours, Graham Watson’s perhaps a bit earlier. Tim Church is feigning disconnection from the incident, but I am pretty sure he was egging the lads on or at least enjoying the show. One (as yet) unidentified boy depicted is either oblivious or indifferent to the whole matter, reading the notice boards. Another day, another schoolkid getting the bumps. This was not a special or unusual scene at Alleyn’s back then.
Anyway, Paul has relocated the central subject-matter in several eye-catching ways and asked me to choose a favourite. So here is a scrape of all five of Paul’s. I have added titles of my own and marked Paul’s homework.
GoosebumpsSpeed BumpsBumper To BumperA Bump In The RoadDown To Earth With A Bump
It is pretty clear from the medieval texts I covered in the article, Ancient Arithmetic, that tennis game scoring, since time immemorial, was a four point system described as 15, 30, 45 and 60:
Yet in modern parlance we use the number 40 to represent the third point, rather than 45. Most writers, if they mention the matter at all, suggest that 40 is merely an abbreviation for 45. The 1822: A Treatise on Tennis By a Member of the Tennis Club, now attributed to Robert Lukin, also referenced in Ancient Arithmetic, simply states that the score is called:
…40 or 45.
But since I published my tetralogy of pieces, several people have contacted me wondering about this forty/forty-five matter, so I thought I should delve a little deeper. Not least, I wondered how recent (or ancient) the use of forty might be. Also, is there actual evidence that “forty” merely is an abbreviation for “forty-five”.
John Florio was an Anglo-Italian with a fascinating back story of his own. His “Frutes” books are basically primers in the English and Italian languages. Chapter 2 of the Second Frutes book (pp15-29) is a dramatised story of a day going to play tennis with the intention to go on to the theatre afterwards. There’s a good deal of insight into Tudor tennis in that chapter, which is a fascinating and amusing read. But the key phrase for this purpose is spoken by the character H on P25:
But the habit of abbreviating “forty-five” to “forty” dates back at the very least several further decades…possibly even back to time immemorial.
Heiner Gillmeister buries the relevant factoid in a footnote within his excellent 1997 book,Tennis A Cultural History, which is also referenced in the main Ancient Arithmetic piece.
…quarante for quarante-cinq seems to be attested, at least by implication, for the year 1536.
Gillmeister (via Christian Schmitt) references Mathurin Cordier (Corderius, a fascinating character who was a humanist theologian, grammarian and pedagogue) from his De Corrupti Sermonis Emendatione, of 1536, in which the author is admonishing schoolboys for their sloppy use of language:
Caeterum omnino ineptum est quod pueri dicunt “quadra” pro “quadraginta quinque”.
Besides, it is totally useless to say “square” instead of “forty-five”
WTF? Kids abbreviating to absurdity. Who knew? Obvs.
Let’s be honest folks, most of us have been known, on occasion, to say “thirty-five” rather than “thirty-fifteen”…
…or “fift” rather than “fifteen”
…or “van” rather than “advantage”.
Mea culpa…or, as the young folks might say, “meculp”.
In syllable terms, we’re shaving but one syllable in English, when shortening forty-five to forty. Likewise in French; quarante-cinq to quarante. But in Italian, shortening quarantacinque to quaranta is an even more understandable five syllable to three syllable drop. The Latin equivalent, quadraginta quinque to quadraginta would be a six to four shift.
But the extra shave in Latin from quadraginta quinque to quadra really is going too far. Or not far enough; why stop at “quadra” when you can monosyllabically say “quad” and save yet another syllable?
Did the young really have such an abbreviated approach to language, even in the first half of the 16th century?
Yup. It seems they did. Perhaps we humans have done so since time immemorial.
My favourite novel that uses mistaken identity as its central plot device is Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. William Boot, a genteel nature correspondent, is sent as a foreign correspondent to Ishmaelia, a crisis-ridden East African country, as he has been mistaken for his adventurous distant cousin, John Boot. There are predictably hilarious results.
Ishmaelia is a thinly veiled fictional version of Abyssinia, now known as Ethiopia, a place that Evelyn Waugh had visited in 1930 as a special correspondent for The Times. Waugh wrote up his African travels in a wonderfully funny book, Remote People.
In one amusing scene, when Waugh and his entourage had travelled into the heart of Ethiopia, a guard takes an interest in Waugh’s possessions. Waugh tells us that the guard:
…in exchange showed me his rifle and bandoleer. About half the cartridges were empty shells; the weapon was in very poor condition. It could not possibly have been used with any accuracy and probably not with safety…
More than 75 years after Waugh’s visit, Janie and I journeyed to Ethiopia, where we encountered a great many tribespeople with such weapons and ourselves were the victims of a form of mistaken identity.
We spent a few days in the South Omo Valley; a tribal part of Southern Ethiopia near the border with South Sudan. We had a fascinating time there.
Our small lodge was near some Karo villages. On our second day, we had arranged to visit Turmi, a Hamer tribe village, on market day.
Our guide, Dawit, asked us if we would mind if a local tribesman, Adama, join us in the vehicle. Adama is, unusually, half Karo & half Hamer; he wanted to visit his Hamer friends and relatives. Adama had trekked to our lodge in the hope of hitching a ride. Naturally we agreed and had a peculiar conversation with Adama, through Dawit.
Adama wanted to know more about us. He wondered how much cattle we owned.
Dawit passed on my reply; we don’t own any cattle.
Adama asked what other types of livestock and how many of them we owned.
Dawit broke it to Adama, gently, that I had told him that we own no livestock at all.
Adama said that he felt sorry for us; he hadn’t realised that we were poor people.
Dawit tried to explain to Adama that we come from a society where wealth is not measured in livestock.
“He says he understands”, Dawit told me.
I looked at Adama and smiled. He smiled back. The smile was a smile of pity. Of course he understood. Ian and Janie were proud people who did not want to be perceived as poor. But by the sound of it we came from a pitifully poor tribe, universally blighted with a chronic livestock shortage.
We had been mistaken for paupers…or had we? In Karo and Hamer terms, we were/are indeed poor.
Turmi market was wonderfully colourful, bustling and friendly.
Livestock is unquestionably an important feature of that society.
We visited a Karo village later that same day, on the way back to our lodge. We had heard that the Ethiopian Government had just built the village its first school, which was due to open later that year, but had provided no consumables for the school. Janie and I always take a few boxes of biros with us when we travel in the developing world; we thought this place well suited to a gift of 100 pens.
The chief of the village was delighted and hastily arranged a ceremony for the gift.
Once we had ceremoniously handed over the pens, the chief – showing no concern for social distancing whatsoever – embraced me, spat over my shoulder three times and (through Dawit) explained that Janie and I were now honorary members of the village.
Janie and I then spent some time in OUR Karo village. I wonder whether the World War One vintage Lee Enfield 303 rifles the villagers were carrying had been around since Evelyn Waugh’s visit some 75 years earlier? Or perhaps they had found their way to the South Omo Valley from the 1970s Alleyn’s School CCF arsenal.
To celebrate our new-found membership of the Karo tribe, Janie tried her hand at hair adornment…
…then one of the Karo body artists reciprocated with some face painting, after a false start using all white face paint, he quickly made up a small batch of dark face paint.
So, as honorary Karo people, I suppose we weren’t mistaken for poor people, we ARE poor Karo people. We have no livestock and we have no antique weaponry. But we do have some exceptionally rich memories of our time with those remote people.
Postscript One: A Video Of My Performance
Below is an “uncut” video of my performance, published with the kind permission of the ThreadZoomMash participants.
Postscript Two: Links To Our Ethiopia Trip
If you would like to know more about our 2006 visit to Ethiopia, you can find a placeholder and links here, but at the time of writing this piece I have not yet Ogblogged my journals.
If you just want to look at our photos from the South Omo Valley, the Flickr link below has an album with the best 80 of our photos from there:
Postscript Three: A Very Brief Review Of The Mistaken Identity Evening
I don’t think that Kay Scorah imagined that she was choosing a dark topic when she chose Mistaken Identity, but the vast majority of the pieces were very dark indeed.
Let me put it this way. Terry went first, with a creepy piece about the grim reaper visiting the wrong potential “reapee” by mistake. It was almost as creepy as the following short scene from one of my favourite dark movies…
…and Terry’s piece was one of the least dark pieces of the evening.
John’s brilliantly structured story involved Northern Irish and Islamic terrorism echoing in the life of one female character.
Julie’s story was a beautifully crafted, shocking piece about horrific, fatal domestic abuse.
Adrian’s story, which started lightheartedly enough, ended with the murder of a young man mistaken for a mass murderer.
In a near-futile attempt to lighten the mood before a short break, Kay scheduled Jan’s story, which was a poetic piece full of mystery about a potential re-encounter with a former lover..or was it merely mistaken identity?
After the break, David resumed the dark theme with a thriller about a man kidnapped by thugs for mysterious reasons; but was it a case of mistaken identity?
Then the mood finally got a bit lighter, with Geraldine’s thoughtful piece about her early days in New York and how status seemed to be identified (mistakenly or not) simply through one’s job title, place of origin or even merely one’s name.
Before my piece, which was the last, Ian T told us about several of his doppelgängers; Jeremy Corbyn (I don’t think so, but judge for yourselves), an Ecology party candidate in 1983 named Ian Newton and a man in a red coat at a church parade who looked so much like Ian that even Ian himself thought the other fellow might be him.
Perhaps I should have done my own doppelgänger story, not that I have delusions of grandeur about my scribblings:
It was a great evening, as always. Many thanks to Kay for organising it, to Rohan Candappa for the original idea upon which ThreadZoomMash is based and also a huge thanks to all of the participants.
