A Very Inky Question

[David Orsam]

I think this is a sufficiently important point to start a new thread.

In a letter from Alec Voller to Nick Warren dated 21 November 1994, Voller says this (with my bold):

"Your question about fading is a difficult one to answer. All aniline dystuffs have poor lightfastness and Nigrosine is among the poorest. But lightfastness is only a factor which comes into play when the writing is actually exposed to light. No ink is going to fade in the pages of a closed book."

Now, we need to bear in mind that when Voller examined the Diary in October 1995 the only provenance story in play in respect of the Diary being a genuine item was that it had been handed to Mike by Tony Devereux (quite possibly having been given to him by Anne, having been in her family since the 1950s). As such, the assumption would have been that, if not a modern forgery, it had probably been opened and exposed to light a fair bit.

But, of course, what we are now being asked to believe by the Diary Defenders is that the book had lain closed beneath floorboards (possibly in a biscuit tin) for many years, perhaps 100 years, before being removed on 9th May 1992. If that is the case then, on Voller's own account, we either shouldn't observe any fading or the fading seen by Voller in 1995 had occurred since the removal of the Diary since 1992. Given the similar fading observed by Voller in 2001 in respect of Nick Warren's test handwriting sample copied at some point between 1998 and 2001, the latter seems to be quite likely.

[Sam Flynn]

Catch-22?

Or Catch-92, as the case may be.

[caz]

I'm not sure how this helps to determine whether the diary was under the floorboards waiting to be released into the sunlight on the morning of March 9th 1992, or it had yet to be written on March 9th 1992.

If we are meant to believe the ink was not applied to the paper until the beginning of April 1992, 12 days before Mike took his baby to "that London", are we back to Anne and the completed diary basking under a sunlamp for the final 7 days, so when Voller examined it three and a half years later he would see the equivalent of 90+ years of natural looking, irregular fading?

There must be a reason why Voller thought the diary ink was Nigrosine based [with its poor lightfastness] but not Diamine.

Love,

Confused of Sidmouth
X

[Sam Flynn]

As an aside, was Voller experienced in the ageing of manuscripts? Surely that would be the province of a forensic document examiner, not a chemist.

[David Orsam]

The thing is, Voller accepted in 2001 that a document written in 1995 with Diamine ink exhibited similar fading characteristics to the Diary. This means that a document written six years earlier (possibly less if the colour copy that he saw was made earlier than 2001) was, apparently, and amazingly, showing fading consistent with a document supposedly written 80-90 years earlier (or 90+ years earlier depending on which day of the week Voller was speaking). This is before we even need to think about anyone doing something to the Diary with a UV sunlamp. As for the possible use of a sunlamp, Voller expressly said in his letter of 8th Feb 1996 that the use of an accelerated fading apparatus by an amateur, who didn't really know what they were doing, was more likely to fool him than something done by a professional. Thus:

"I also have to say (ruefully) that as a method of forgery, the above technique would probably produce more convincing results in amateurish rather than professional hands because a person unused to the finer points of the operation of the equipment would probably obtain willy-nilly, exactly the sort of uneven fading that is characteristic of old documents."

But truly we don't even need to get to the sunlamp because Nick Warren's sample exhibited similar fading to the Diary which occurred naturally.

As Sam points out, Voller's job was not to date documents. The chances are he was doing so for the first time ever. And doing so on the hoof during a meeting. Moreover Harris, who did know something about dating documents and possessed a collection of old manuscripts, and whose opinion on dating documents has been cited with approval by one of the world's leading experts on the subject, has said that it wasn't even possible for Voller to have dated the Diary in 1995. Thus:

"The truth is that once an iron-gall ink has matured on the paper for eighteen months or so, no one, on this planet, is able to date that ink by visual examination."

By the time Voller looked at the Diary, the ink must have been on the paper for a minimum of 41 months (and just about exactly 41 months if it had been created in April 1992, as the evidence in this case suggests).

In any event, it's odd that the Diary is supposed to show the effects of 80-90 years of fading if it was lying, closed, under the floorboards of Battlecrease when Voller tells us that "No ink is going to fade in the pages of a closed book."

[rjpalmer]

** bump **

For the benefit of Jay Hartley: "no ink is going to fade in the pages of a closed book" -- Alec Voller, ink chemist.

So how did this fading occur in the Mudbrick Diary if it was under Dodd's floorboards for 103 years?

Wasn't this your explanation for the diary's ink miraculously remaining soluble for all those years?

Something to think about. Have a nice day.

[Iconoclast]

** bump **
For the benefit of Jay Hartley: "no ink is going to fade in the pages of a closed book" -- Alec Voller, ink chemist.
So how did this fading occur in the Mudbrick Diary if it was under Dodd's floorboards for 103 years?
Wasn't this your explanation for the diary's ink miraculously remaining soluble for all those years?
Something to think about. Have a nice day.

This - amongst other reasons such as my ignorance of all things chemistry-related - is why I traditionally steer clear of debates about chemistry and scrapbook, but ...

My early morning reading of this exchange is that the fading in the scrapbook observed by Voller was similar to the fading in the Warren handwriting example observed by Voller, thus implying that each had been exposed to light for roughly the same length of time?

The implication from the Good Lord seems to be that that implies that the writing in the scrapbook was first put down in approximately 1992 (obviously to fit with his hoax theory). But - if Voller is right - and no ink is going to fade in the pages of a closed book, is it not equally logical to wonder if the fading process started on March 9, 1992, when the scrapbook was first retrieved from Battlecrease House?

The reference to the fading of the scrap[book being consistent with 80-90 years is confusing here. Did Voller claim this? I'm sure that he did or else no-one would dare to have posted it, but is it possible for someone to point out where and when Voller made this claim, please, as it is rather crucial to this present debate?

If fading is a reasonably linear process then Voller's 80-90 years comment (if he made it) would obviously favour Anne Barrett's provenance, regardless of what Voller subsequently claimed about the fading of Warren's handwriting. It would provide complications for the Battlecrease House provenance AND the hoax theory, so we really need to understand more clearly what Voller actually said (if he actually said it).

Despite it being early morning, I have located something worth quoting from The Inside Story in which (p206) the authors write:

If the Diary were a Victorian document, the ink could not be Diamine, as Michael Barrett had claimed it to be in at least one forgery confession. On 20 October 1995 came a rebuttal of this possibility from a source that could hardly be bettered, Alec Voller, head chemist at Diamine Ink. Examining the Diary at the Kings Cross offices of Smith Gryphon, Voller announced his conclusion after barely two minutes: 'This is not Diamine ink.' The meeting, at which Robert Smith, Shirley Harrison, Sally Evemy, Keith Skinner and Martin Howells were also present, was taped in full, but it is Voller's conclusion that is most significant. 'Certainly the ink did not go on to the paper within recent years ... you are looking at a document which in my opinion is at least 90 years old and may be older ... I came with an open mind and if I thought it was a modern ink I would have said so.'

So I imagine this was the comment being quoted earlier in the thread. As I say, it rather obviously favours Anne's provenance over the Battlecrease one but also - crucially - over the Orsam Hoax Theory also. So this begs the question - which is probably a tangent but surely still relevant - was Voller badly misguided in his claim or was the ink in 1995 faded sufficiently to appears to be at least 90 years old and (tautologically) may be older? Or was it not the fading he was commenting on but the nature of the ink which he was able to recognise as 90 years old at least? Or - Lord - was he referring to the overall product (the scrapbook) and not necessarily just the ink?

Anyone got any thoughts to help our dear confused readers out?

Ike

[caz]

I have some thoughts, Ike, but I'm not sure if they will help or hinder!

"Your question about fading is a difficult one to answer. All aniline dystuffs have poor lightfastness and Nigrosine is among the poorest. But lightfastness is only a factor which comes into play when the writing is actually exposed to light. No ink is going to fade in the pages of a closed book."

This was Alec Voller, writing to Nick Warren in November 1994, almost a year before Voller saw the diary which had prompted their correspondence. I'm not sure Warren ever had access to it. The nature of any fading of the diary handwriting was presumably 'a closed book' to them both at the time.

Is this a simple misunderstanding I see before me? Hard to tell, as we only get an extract of Voller's reply, and don't know the full context in which it was written. We don't even know what Warren's question was, nor how he worded it. So we are compelled in this instance to read between the lines, which is far from ideal. But if Voller was merely making a distinction between a) handwriting on, for example, a loose sheet of paper, which fades due to its exposure to the light, and b) handwritten pages inside a book, which would typically spend most of their time deprived of light, it might explain why Warren's question was a difficult one for Voller to answer.

Voller is relating the question specifically to the lightfastness of certain dyestuffs, and makes the rather obvious point, that poor lightfastness will cause the writing to fade, but only if and when it is exposed to light. In other words, no ink is going to fade due to its poor lightfastness, while it's sitting between the covers of a book. I get that. I imagine everyone would.

But is Voller saying that exposure to light is the only cause of fading? That's not quite so clear - to me at least. He describes the uneven fading he sees in the scrapbook in October 1995 as "very characteristic" of inks of "some considerable age". He goes on to describe the effects you would get with a modern non-permanent writing ink as "the reverse" of what he observes at one point in the diary. With a modern ink, Voller says, "you would get a regular fade-out along that line" in the diary, where "the ink has faded very badly" and "you can see the irregular fading". More of his observations about the diary writing can be found on pages 370 and 371 of Shirley Harrison's 1998 paperback.

There is no suggestion here that this irregular fading has been caused by the pages having been exposed to the light. Voller points to "a line with very little fading" ['tis love that will finish me'], then describes the next line ['tis love that I regret'] as "quite badly faded except for the beginning".

I don't understand the ink chemistry, but any natural exposure to light would have been exactly the same for each line on any given page, and yet the writing had faded to very different degrees, even from one line to the next. The scrapbook was obviously not kept closed all the time between 1992 and 1995, but how much fading would have happened as a result of the contents being read, transcribed or examined at various times during that period?

Warren was presumably still aiming to prove in 2001 that the diary ink was of the same modern type as he had used for his own handwriting sample in 1995. It must have been music to his ears when Voller told him that the 'colour copy' taken of the sample at some point exhibited 'similar' fading characteristics to what he remembered seeing in the scrapbook all those years before. There's nothing like comparing like with like - but this was nothing like it. Not only was Voller expected to compare an undated, possibly fading photocopy of a faded sample of writing, with actual pages from the original diary, but he was expected to do it from memory, having only inspected the latter on one occasion, six years previously.

What is interesting to note from the colour facsimile of the diary, made in 2017 and reproduced in Robert Smith's book, is that the differences in fading, which Voller was able to describe with such clarity in 1995, when looking at the last two 'tis love' lines in the document itself, are not in evidence at all. All six lines are similarly clear and perfectly legible in the facsimile, while I would challenge anyone to put a fag paper between the final two in terms of appearance or fading. This alone demonstrates how an original document can reveal so much more than a copy, even to the naked eye.

At least Voller didn't attempt to answer Warren's 'difficult' question using guesswork based on unknowns. When he saw the diary a year on, the fading didn't strike him as evidence that the ink had been applied in recent years; quite the opposite. And it wasn't only the fading that caught Voller's eye, telling him the writing wasn't recent. He only saw the faintest bronzing on certain specific words when he held the diary pages up to a window in daylight: "...in one or two places there is some very light bronzing...tilted to the light [from the window] it can just be seen..." This effect also indicated to him that the writing was "genuinely old", with the implication that the bronzing, in his opinion, would have been present when the diary was first examined, three years previously. It evidently didn't appear to him like a more recent development. Could Baxendale have missed these clues, simply because he didn't try the 'window' test? He missed the presence of iron, so what else might have eluded him? Voller also observed a dot of ink "beneath" an old glue stain, which did "not have the feel of modern synthetic glue". This told him that the ink had been there "a very very long time". Nobody has yet tried to explain this glue away, and Mike never mentioned it being on his 'must have' shopping list for raw materials, along with the linseed oil.

If Harris and Warren predicted that the diary ink would continue to bronze following Voller's visual examination in 1995, what evidence is there that they were right? Robert Smith maintains that the writing has not changed in colour or appearance from the day he first saw it, so does the possibility not remain that Baxendale's optical examination in 1992 simply missed the signs Voller picked up in 1995?

Can Warren's copy of a faded handwriting sample really be used as reliable evidence that Voller mistook all the signs that went into forming his opinion, including the irregular fading, the faint bronzing and the glue?

Have a great weekend!

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Just before I head off into the garden with a cold beer...

Other questions I have yet to see answered convincingly:

1) Why did it not occur to Baxendale that the ink had only been on the paper for a few weeks [since early April 1992] if that had been the case? When he examined the writing and found nothing to suggest the presence of iron; observed no signs of bronzing; and believed it contained a modern ingredient, which turned out to have been used in inks from 1867, he never even hinted at the possibility that it was that recent. Did anyone in those very early years give their professional opinion that the ink was, or could have been, as recently applied as just a day or so before Mike showed off his diary in London, not knowing what to expect?

2) If Baxendale's 'freely soluble' result was as good as it gets, and ought to have ruled out any possibility of an older document, why did all those other professionals, commissioned by both 'sides', see any merit in conducting their own tests or visual examinations, knowing that the ink would have had sufficient time to bond with the paper by then? Eastaugh, Rendell and his team, Leeds, AFI, Voller? Were none of them convinced that Baxendale had proved anything about the diary's age? He only had to demonstrate that it was written later than May 1889, and he had the best chance, being first in line.

Finally, when Mike met Baxendale in person, in June 1992, to hand over the diary, I wonder what their individual expectations were. If Mike narrowly cleared that hurdle, in pursuit of his best seller, he found himself in the opposite position by October 1995, in pursuit of revenge, when the diary he tried to claim was written with Diamine ink, was shown to Diamine Man himself. Did Mike curse his bad luck when Voller failed to recognise the ink as his own? Or was he not remotely surprised, because he'd made it up, along with everything else?

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

Hi Caz,

The subtlety of the dissecting switchblade!

Two first class expositions (#8 and #9) there, beautifully-constructed - I'll have two pints of whatever you're slurping in that botanic garden of yours in Shetland, Surrey, or Solihull; should just about get me halfway to the exquisite, sharp, dagger-like insight of your latest pair of posts.

Did Mike curse his bad luck when Voller failed to recognise the ink as his own? Or was he not remotely surprised, because he'd made it up, along with everything else?

Am I not right in thinking that Mike hurled at Keith Skinner the 'very bottle' of Diamine ink he had used to write (via Anne's hand) the Victorian scrapbook when Keith - along with Paul Feldman and Martin Howells - made the fatal mistake of inviting Mike to come down to Landarn to explain face-to-face how he had created the enigmatic document? I think Keith caught it (or else didn't and carried around a black eye - or was it a blue eye? - for a fortnight).

Typical of the master-hoaxer that was Mike Barrett, it didn't appear to have occurred to him that everyone would just assume he'd picked it up at a local WH Smiths on his was to Feldman House.

I think that was the same - surreal - occasion when Mike promised to show the assembled luminaries exactly how the scrapbook had been written if only someone could get him a fountain pen (no need to look around for ink, eh?) only for Keith to go looking for one until someone thought to ask Mike what consequence its retrieval from the darkest recesses of Feldman's desk would have given that Mike was claiming that it was Anne who'd written the thing. Comedy Central or what? "I'm here all decade", said Barrett, as he caught the flowers, waved to his adoring audience, and slipped off stage to the pub where he got smashed out of his skull, though no-one could tell the difference (thank you, Dorothy Parker).

And - slap my chops with a wet fish! - hadn't a similar awkward moment occurred on Saturday, November 5, 1994, when the hapless, grasping Alan Gray had said a similar thing to Mike to which Mike (give him his due) had quickly retorted something along the lines of, "It was fifty-fifty"?

Well, you could never say that Michael Barrett forgot which version of the story he needed to tell that day (moment) regardless of how much eighty shilling he'd managed to syphon out of someone stupid enough to entertain him.

Hope you have a smashing weekend, Caz. Mrs I and I have finally completed the sale of Mrs I's ma's hoose just outside Auld Reekie so we are planning to get smashed too tha neet!!!



Ike

[Iconoclast]

Am I not right in thinking that Mike hurled at Keith Skinner the 'very bottle' of Diamine ink he had used to write (via Anne's hand) the Victorian scrapbook when Keith - along with Paul Feldman and Martin Howells - made the fatal mistake of inviting Mike to come down to Landarn to explain face-to-face how he had created the enigmatic document? I think Keith caught it (or else didn't and carried around a black eye - or was it a blue eye? - for a fortnight).

Mr. Skinner has this fine morning emailed me to clarify that it was Mike himself who had requested the meeting, as long as Feldman would pay his train fare (naturally). Keith adds that Mike did not claim that the hurled bottle of ink which landed poor old Keith in A&E for seven hours was the original one. One has to ask, then, "Mike, what on earth was the point???" but - then - that's a question which resonated down the years far more frequently where Bongo Barrett was concerned.

You'll all hear more in my brilliant Society's Pillar 2025 but as a teasing indication of Michael Barrett's inability to lie straight in bed, here's the opening exchange of a truly pantomimic, surreal encounter lasting many hours (that Mike's audience probably wished in retrospect they'd spent with Keith in A&E):

Michael Barrett, Paul Feldman, Keith Skinner, & Martin Howells
Baker Street, London,
Thursday, July 20, 1995

MB: Hello, Keith.
PF: You’re drunk.
MB: I am not drunk.
PF: You haven’t had a drink today? Have you had a drink today?
MB: No. Today, no.
PF: Mike, I saw you sitting outside the pub with a pint of beer.
MB: I know.
PF: So why’d you lie? What for?
MB: Exactly because that’s where you always fall down.
PF: That’s where I fall down?
MB: Yeah.
PF: Keith’s just heard you tell a bare faced lie.
MB: Yeah and I’ll tell you a great deal because wait until I produce the documents in my briefcase.
PF: Go on then.
MB: In my briefcase.
PF: I’m here. I’m listening.
KS: I’ve got a tape running, Mike.
MB: I don’t mind that. I don’t mind that, just remember Keith, I’ve got me own briefcase.
KS: Your briefcase?
PF: That’s it behind you.
MB: Right. I’ve got a hell of a lot of documents in here, Paul.

Mike Barrett probably had the customary sandwiches in his briefcase and no more. Certainly, in the many hours which followed, he produced nothing from it that demonstrated anything to anyone other than that he was a chronic liar, confabulator, and fantasist, and also a very big and irritating tit.

PS I should add that the most obvious thing Mike could have had in his Christmas present to himself would have been his devastating January 5, 1995 affidavit (and perhaps his January 23 and 26 statements supporting the affidavit). But he didn't. Go figure, as the Yanks say.

Cheers,

Ike

[Iconoclast]

PS I should add that the most obvious thing Mike could have had in his Christmas present to himself would have been his devastating January 5, 1995 affidavit (and perhaps his January 23 and 26 statements supporting the affidavit). But he didn't. Go figure, as the Yanks say.

Mr. Skinner has this fine morning emailed me to clarify that my response to his earlier email of this fine morning erred slightly from l’actualité, as follows:

What Mike did have in his briefcase was a copy of the signed affidavit he had made at Morecroft Dawson and Garnetts on April 26th 1993 where he swore on oath that Tony Devereux had given him the diary - which I photocopied. There were only 5 of the 6 pages and I eventually got a copy of the sixth and final page from Sally Evemy on January 23rd 1997. (See pages 35-37 Inside Story [that's a book about the Victorian scrapbook, for the benefit of all of you who have never read one])

On my copy I have scribbled at the time of photocopying:

From Mike Barrett - July 20th 1995
(Incomplete as MB's copy was unbound in his case - pages all over the place
MB too drunk to ensure that he was giving me the full document)

... Mike took it out of his briefcase I asked him if I could take a photocopy to which he had no objection. ... What for me was significant was the date it was made (April 26th 1993) triggered, I believe, by the fact that JM's name was in the newspapers as was speculation (driven by Feldy's theorising) that the diary had come out of Battlecrease House.

And so there we have it, dear readers. Mike Barrett asked for a meeting with Paul Feldman in London and got Paul Feldman, Keith Skinner, and Martin Howells, three luminaries in the story (if you exclude Mike). He travelled a long way and when he arrived he said he had documents in his briefcase which would blow the case apart (I'm paraphrasing, granted). He then made a big play about how the scrapbook was a hoax, before producing as his only evidence his damning affidavit, but he unfortunately appeared to have brought the wrong one because the one he brought was the one in which he said he didn't do it. Oh dear, oh dear (thank you, Martin Fido).

This is addictive, it really is:

PF: Which one actually wrote it? Whose handwriting is it, yours or Anne’s?
MB: Anne’s.
PF: Oh, it’s Anne’s writing? Why do you want a fountain pen then?
MB: Right, right.
PF: What’s the point in getting a fountain pen?
MB: Hang on, hang on - bear with me, just bear with me. Just bear with me. Just bear with me, please Paul and I ask you to bear with me.

Can you sense his confusion when, finally, his slick lies catch him out and he doesn't have a ready answer at hand? You could scratch out that last quotation and replace it with:

MB: [Thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, changes subject]

Remember, dear readers, this is the Enterprise Allowance/Writers' Circle asker of questions to predominantly local celebrities in the 1980s whose wife had to tidy up his mess, type it up, and get it to DC Thompson in time for their next Happy Hour; who then, we are led to believe, wrote a hoaxed account of James Maybrick as Jack the Spratt McVitie and literally fooled no-one, not even those people who have used his breakdown to advance their own personal agenda.

Ike

[rjpalmer]

Enterprise Allowance/Writers' Circle asker of questions to predominantly local celebrities in the 1980s whose wife had to tidy up his mess, type it up, and get it to DC Thompson in time for their next Happy Hour;

All of this is off-topic, Ike, but I do appreciate how you can't help bringing your discussion of the Maybrick Hoax back to ground zero: Mike Barrett.

You frequently scold us for discussing Barrett and only Barrett, but the next thing we see is you back to discussing him your own good self! Just as it should be--for the diary begins and ends with our boy Bongo.

Being a child of the Great Plains, I had to look up the details of Maggie Thatcher's Enterprise Allowance.

It was apparently suspended in 1987, while Barrett's 'brief' career as a freelance writer (as you inaccurately portrayed it) extended into 1988 and apparently even to 1989, so your theory here, while irrelevant in any case, may be on just as weak footing as your theoretical briefcase full of sandwiches.

You also wrongly stated that Barrett was only published in one magazine when it was in at least three.

And Kylie Minogue is not a local celebrity. She's Australian.

And anyone who has read these articles can see they amount to more than 'preset' questions, so why the mischaracterization? (See below, but get out your magnifying glass).

And though you are merely guessing, what is wrong with preset questions, anyway? Are you suggesting that coming prepared to an interview shows a lack of professionalism? That's an odd and unfair take, isn't it?

And what about your suggestion that Barrett wrote these articles as part of a "writer's course"? On what is this based? Are you suggesting this writer's course lasted for 3-4 years?

Mr. Hartley has just reintroduced the allegation of Barrett's near illiteracy, but as you can readily imagine, I have no problem whatsoever with Anne Graham having helped Mike along with his projects, whatever they may have entailed, but what about this:

Isn't it entirely possible that the drunken, erratic Barrett of 1994-1999 that we so often hear about from you and Keith and Caroline is a far-cry from the Mike Barrett of 1990-1992?

After all, Feldman quotes Paul Begg early on as saying that "those of us who have been a little less critical of Mike Barrett are those of us who have met him." (page 19)

This isn't in reference to Barrett's writing abilities, of course, but at the same time Paul doesn't sound like he's describing a drunken, erratic, ignorant lout, but a rather pleasant, plausible man who carried himself respectably enough.

And we hear Anne Graham describing how when she first met Mike she had been impressed by his 'intelligence.' Shirley Harrison similarly described Barrett as 'far from stupid.'

I am of the opinion that Barrett's kidney problems, his generally bad health, his heavy drinking, his stroke or alleged stroke, and his divorce turned him into a very different man than what he once was.

[rjpalmer]

In case you can't read the above, the article about the boy from Sierra Leon was written by none other than Michael Barrett.

What is your explanation, Ike? And is it fair to represent this as nothing more than 'preset questions' concocted by an illiterate and aimed at a local celebrity?

[caz]

Hi Caz,

The subtlety of the dissecting switchblade!

Two first class expositions (#8 and #9) there, beautifully-constructed - I'll have two pints of whatever you're slurping in that botanic garden of yours in Shetland, Surrey, or Solihull; should just about get me halfway to the exquisite, sharp, dagger-like insight of your latest pair of posts.

How very kind of you, Ike. My tipple of choice last Friday afternoon, in my Sid Valley garden, was a pilsner called Offshore, brewed by Sharp's. By pure coincidence, I have lived in more places beginning with an S than any other initial, although Shetland and Solihull are not two of them. My early years were spent in Southfields, south west London, before moving to South Harrow. I later lived for a while in Streatham Common, then Sydenham Hill. When the suspicious scrapbook entered my life, in late 1998, I was living in Shirley, Surrey, before moving down to Somerton in Somerset, and finally to Sidford Cross, Sidmouth. Just as well I don't have a lisp!

I think that was the same - surreal - occasion...

Don't you start!

Comedy Central or what? "I'm here all decade", said Barrett, as he caught the flowers, waved to his adoring audience, and slipped off stage to the pub where he got smashed out of his skull, though no-one could tell the difference (thank you, Dorothy Parker).

And - slap my chops with a wet fish! - hadn't a similar awkward moment occurred on Saturday, November 5, 1994, when the hapless, grasping Alan Gray had said a similar thing to Mike to which Mike (give him his due) had quickly retorted something along the lines of, "It was fifty-fifty"?

Well, you could never say that Michael Barrett forgot which version of the story he needed to tell that day (moment) regardless of how much eighty shilling he'd managed to syphon out of someone stupid enough to entertain him.

Hope you have a smashing weekend, Caz. Mrs I and I have finally completed the sale of Mrs I's ma's hoose just outside Auld Reekie so we are planning to get smashed too tha neet!!!



Ike

Show off!

Cheers! I had a super smashing DAiRy free long weekend, with sunshine, showers and a sudden storm, and several sessions of Scrabble, trying to outdo Mister Brown's success on the scoring front.

Love,

Switchypoo
X