Bonkers

I have a particular fondness and obsession with the intricacies of the written word, fuelled I'm sure by the late great Ronnie Barker who's genius wordplay in his comedy sketches are second to none. I mean, who could forget the classic hardware store sketch some of which is below.

(Ronnie Barker enters the shop, wearing a scruffy tank-top and beanie)

BARKER: Four Candles!

CORBETT: Four Candles?

BARKER: Four Candles.

(Ronnie Corbett makes for a box, and gets out four candles. He places them on the counter)

BARKER: No, four candles!

CORBETT (confused): Well there you are, four candles!

BARKER: No, fork 'andles! 'Andles for forks!

The four candles, fork handles play on words is actually called a oronym and is a british dialect homophone, I know all this is a bit much for a lighthearted Thursday morning blog but bear with me. There are plenty more that could have been used, ware, wear, where for example are interchangeable but change the context of the sentence. 'Where's the soap?' and 'Wears the soap' changes context when you imagine two nuns in a bath saying it to each other.

Anyway, one fun thing I discovered when I was young was YYURYYUBICURYY4ME, way before text speak was the norm and I used to try and make these up. It actually says 'Too wise (YY) you are too wise you be, I see you are too wise for me'. An old one I made was I82CUPB4ME, which is actually quite lame and based on the far superior LOLOAQICI82QB4IP. Did you get it? The first one is 'I hate to see you pee before me' and the second is 'Hello, Hello, a queue I see, I hate to queue before I pee'

The alphabet is an incredibly complex code, if the alphabet is written down the normal A to Z way it can be reordered a staggering 403,291,461,126,604 times without repeating a sequence. Which brings me to my next obsession, numbers.

I wasn't particularly good at mathematics at school, it wasn't that I couldn't do it I just did it differently to get the same result, not good when you are asked to show your working out. Some of the things I used to puzzle over was questions like how many times could ten men sitting next to each other change the order they were sitting without it being repeated. The answers always fascinated me, it's 3,628,800 times by the way, but I used to go one further and calculate how long it would take if one change was made each day. Unfortunately they wouldn't live to see them all as it would take 9,935 years, forty days and be an incredibly pointless pastime not to mention a hinderance to life. 'No sorry dear we can't get married on the 24th, I have to go and sit in position number 22,536, it's my turn again to be second from the left and I simply can't miss the chance. Sorry.'

I once read a brain teaser that kept me occupied pre-calculator days for a number of hours, quite simply it said 'Arrange the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9 to add up to a hundred exactly. Grouping numbers I worked away in blocks looking for a pattern, I even used my trusty ZX-81 and wrote a small routine to crack it. Eventually it came up with the answer which was unashamedly easy looking back, 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+(8x9)=100

All this though has been a bumbling dribble to explain the background to this.

A new chapter of intrigue, Back To Front, pulls together eight stories and my obsession with letters and numbers to open up a larger timeline in the Lost Impossimals universe. The paintings will take a while yet to complete but the stories are well underway. Secret societies, unbroken codes, royalty and even the odd scientist all play their role as we discover just where the Sherlock Sidewinder went, who has the key to the secret garden and what on earth is a Chocolate Crackercat.

 

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