The Great Hospital, Pt.2

Righto … Now you've seen the shabby state that buildings can get into after almost a thousand years of neglect and have glimpsed our desperate attempts to preserve what's left, let us venture inside the east end of St.Helen's Church where we will discover one of the most truly strange rooms I know of.

Laydees and gentlemen, pray allow me to introduce The Great Hospital's "Eagle Ward".

That's a doozy of a ceiling, isn't it?
Any guesses as to when it was painted and why?
Hokay, I'll tell you.

Way back in the 1370s, Bishop Henry Despenser (known to himself and his thuggish apologists as "The Fighting Bishop" but actually a particularly nasty mercenary in Pope Urban V's mad Vatican Army) was put in charge here when Urban got sick of him.
The Black Death raged all about. In 1371 almost half of the population of Norwich died of it and the streets would have resounded to the carters' Pythonesque cries of "Bring out your dead!"
And following hot on the pestilential heels of the Black Death came The Peasants' Revolt.

Eventually things started to settle down again and in 1381 Despenser himself put murder, rape and pillage behind him and rebuilt the chancel as an act of thanksgiving for the failure of The Peasants' Revolt.
While he was at it he spotted an opportunity to suck up to some royal patronage and decided to spruce the east end of the church up a bit for the visit in 1383 of Anne of Bohemia, King Richard the Second's new bride.

The black spreadeagle was her family motif and so the existing chestnut boarded ceiling - already almost two hundred years old - was decorated with carved and gilded bosses and framework to form 252 separate panels, in each of which was painted an eagle.

Six hundred and twenty-five years later it is still in remarkably spiffy condition, having survived a fire during Kett's Rebellion in 1549 (see old Norwich posts), another one in 1888 and a clutch of German bombs just across the road in 1942.

Now that we've admired the spectacular ceiling, we can lower our eyes and discover something truly strange and more than a little disturbing.

This is the upper floor that we mentioned yesterday and since the mid 1600s, the luckier among the city's elderly and infirm were housed here.
The current cubicles are Victorian and we'll take a good look around them in a moment, but what is truly scary is that these - with no running water until the 1950s and toilet facilities down a twisty staircase and out across several courtyards and alleys down toward the river - were still in use in the 1980s!

For a while this had been a unisex ward for the women, though the central corridor was a communal "snuggery" for everyone to use and was by all accounts quite a social gathering place.

Let's take a peek into one of the bedrooms, shall we?
Other than the obvious additions of contemporary newspapers (and a great copy of The Magnet comic with Billy Bunter on the cover) these rooms have remained exactly as they were when the last occupants were rehoused in the early 1980s.
Note the chamberpot beside the bed. Even in the eighties there were no inside toilets here and it was a fair old walk in the dark to get to the outside privy.

This is the other half of the same room.
Until quite recently this was all the space each person had to live in, but after a critical report in the 1950s every pair of bedrooms had a communal parlour between them made from what had been a third bedroom.

Again, until the fifties when the big old heaters were put in, the only heat came from a small fireplace at each end of the ward where the old folk used to huddle together.
I can vouch from many, many visits for the fact that this place is fucking freezing on all but the hottest summer days.

Here's one of the shared parlours between the bedrooms.
The trunk under the table is where the women's personal belongings would be kept.

Not much space for two crotchety old biddies to share their last years in, is it?
Check out the thickness of that partition.
There was no privacy here.
But of course, a few hundred years back, when the poor of the surrounding parish were living twenty to a room in dank, rat-infested cellars this was the height of luxury.

At least the residents had lovely windows, even though standing near them is like standing in front of an open freezer.
The buildings in the background are some of the more modern accommodation which Mike and I refurbished and extended during our time looking after the place. We'll take a look at those later in the week.

Another bedroom and parlour.
I remember my grandparents' homes feeling very similar when I was a lad. Dark furniture and bric-a-brac.
It makes me feel comfortable, as those of you who've seen my house with its dark furniture and bric-a-brac may have guessed.

There was a "snug" at either end of the ward where folk could gather round the tiny fireplace and stave off hypothermia.
Other than the chimneybreast itself, the walls here are icy to the touch and run with condensation in the winter.
Of course with only two puny little fireplaces in this cavernous hall the pitiful amount of heat they generated all went straight up to the ceiling and out through the high windows while drawing cold air in where the old folk huddled.

Here's where our nostalgia started to really kick in.
This kind of stuff was commonplace when I was young. Indeed it was still in use here until only twenty-five years ago.

We used to have a mincer like that! And bars of Fairy soap!
Boy, I wish we still had our old scales. I used to love playing with those weights when I was a nipper.

The running water was installed in the fifties. Before that, the ward had a designated "water carrier" to lug pails of cold water up here.

Having no toilet facilites folk had to rely on chamberpots and bedpans. With the open plan layout of the place that must have been pretty nasty at times.

Not as nasty as some of this lot, however. I shudder at the sight of that surgeon's knife.

Here was where the food was prepared for the poor old dears. Again, it only recently got running water.

Having said all that, by all accounts the residents loved the place - except for the cold and the lack of an indoor privy. But they were well cared for and could look out north to the river and south over the Cathedral and lie in bed and gaze at the lovely ceiling. Apart from two disruptive old gents who were expelled in 1631, everyone seems to have been happy here.

Up until the 1950s they were fed a diet of bread and gruel but had fourteen "Meat Days" spread throughout the year.
On Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays suet puddings were added to the menu plus ten ounces of butter and twelve ounces of cheese per week to snack on between gruel.
Residents were also given two pints of The Great Hospital's own beer per day as the water was unsafe to drink unless you really fancied cholera. The hospital's brewhouse only closed down in 1865 after the busybodies from the Temperance movement insisted on being paid a shilling a week in lieu of beer.

The last photo today shows one reason why it is always so bloody cold in the Eagle Ward.
Downstairs are the unheated storerooms and workshop of the caretaker and all that separates this freezer from the ward above is thin floorboards and several layers of rugs.

So … That was the weird and wonderful Eagle Ward of The Great Hospital.
Spiffy, huh?
Tomorrow we shall feast on eye candy when we wander the cloisters.

The Great Hospital, Pt.1

Hokay, it's time for another wander around the older and odder corners of Norwich.
As some of you know, Mike and I returned yesterday to one of our old haunts, The Great Hospital.

This is a small part of it; St.Helen's Church (as was).
Back in the 1100s, the Parish of St.Helen was having a bit of a sticky time with the arrogant Norman monks in the Cathedral next door.
This wasn't helped by the fact that the good folk of the city, and especially St.Helen's and neighbouring St.Giles' wards got so totally (and quite justifiably) pissed off with the Norman Yoke that they did what Norwich folk have been doing regularly ever since: they rioted, kicked out the monks and burned the monastery and its gates (as documented in a couple of earlier posts that show the late twelfth century gates that the twat-faced bloody Normans forced the people to build to replace the ones they'd trashed).

Anyhoo, by 1249, Bishop Walter Suffield of St.Giles wheedled St.Helen's church and the surrounding land away from its previous owner, William of Dunwich - who was glad to see the back of it - and moved St.Giles' hospital into it; where - as "The Great Hospital" it has been going strong ever since.

Poor old William of Dunwich didn't have much luck after that as not many years later Dunwich itself fell into the sea and was swallowed up in a great storm.
Hey ho.

The Great Hospital itself was originally meant to care for the clergy of Norwich who had become too old, sick or pervy for duty, but mutated over the centuries to become what it still remains: a care home for the city's old and weird (Hi, Mister Plumbly! Yes, you know I'm talking about you).

Here is another part of it, looking from Bishopgate toward the Chaplain's House.

Before we peer inside at some of the older, prettier and distinctly odder parts, please allow me to reminisce about the east window of St.Helen's; bane of my life for many years.

Back in the seventeenth century, a floor was inserted halfway up the church (you'll see the result tomorrow) and the east window got rather fucked up.

As you can see from yesterday's photo, the bottom of the window disappeared completely and the rest of it up to the floor level got infilled. To cap it all, they built a fucking great chimney all the way up the middle of it.

The infill has been painted over and awaits further repair but at least the stonework has been repaired now and the wall stabilised.

Here's what it looked like when I surveyed it. Sorry about the quality of the pictures but these things are A1 size and it would take me days to scan them in and stitch them together so I took some crappy and out of focus photos instead.

The whole east wall back then had rotted away to such an extent it had the consistency of a dunked biscuit and was peeling away from the rest of the building at an alarming rate.
We scaffolded it inside and out and shored it up (it took many years to get the whole lot repaired) and Old Dive clambered up there and measured every single piece of stone and flint and rotten brickwork for the stonemasons to work out what they had to do.

Here are a couple of views of the inside (sorry, but my stupid camera didn't want to focus on these).
This one shows where the floor got inserted, the stairs and the chimneybreast …

And this one shows the parlous state of the stonework behind the chimney.

Here's some of the restored stonework. You see the gap between the window and the chimney? I had to clamber in there with a torch and measure it all.
Sheesh!

The stainless steel bracing may not be pretty but it stops the whole of the end wall falling out.

So that's a brief introduction to a little part of the hospital and one of the many cold, cramped, uncomfortable and occasionally painful things Mike and I had to do to keep the place going.
Tomorrow we shall start looking at fun and pretty (and weird) stuff.

If any of you are remotely interested in the older and prettier parts of Norwich and its glorious history of revolutionary rioting, click on the "Norwich" link at the bottom of this post and have a good rummage in the archives.

Hoorah For Mike!

Hoorah for Mike!
Not Robyn's cat (though hoorah for him, too), but our very own Mike of many posts passim.

Here am I with a non-functioning brain and nothing to blog about when the phone rings and it's Mikey telling me The Great Hospital is having an open day. Yay!

The Great Hospital is a monastic almshouse hospital founded in 1249 that has been in continual operation ever since and back in the early nineties Mike and myself were part of the firm of Architects who looked after the place, so we leapt at the opportunity to wallow in nostalgia and to take lots of photos of a place that's almost never open to the public.

So … for the next few days I will be posting our nostalgiafest (boy, did it bring back some memories for us both!), but it's going to take a while to go through all the pics so for today here are a few photos I took on my walk along the river to meet Mike.

It doesn't look it but it was fucking cold today. I still had ice on my car at half-twelve when I left for Norwich.

Tis the season for being very careful about precisely which bracket fungus you take home to eat.
Not this one, for a start.

Pull's Ferry with a brace of swans.

So … tune in tomorrow to get bored rigid by a mediæval photo tour and a couple of old men wallowing in strange memories.

Duh …

Still no sign of life in my brain, I'm afraid.
I think it's a goner.
So no blog post today.

I found this on Natalie Dee's site and it sums up my state of mind perfectly.
Hey ho.

Statistics, Schmatistics

Was that it?

I mean, was that was all the fuss was about?
Oh, well.
Stick it in a box marked "Used Christmases" and kick it under the bed.

Here's a gripe:
I've got my passport application form at last and there's the inevitable section where you have to state your religion …
I just checked the stats for the UK; a frankly unbelievable 71.8% of Brits profess to being "Christian", with only 15.1% giving "none" for their religion.
I wonder how many of the people who fill in "Christian" actually gave a thought to celebrating the birth of Christ on Christmas morning; I wonder how many of them got off their fat asses and went to church instead of sat around opening presents and teaching their children greed and ingratitude.

I'm not talking about the Yanks here; some of them actually DO go to church; I'm talking about the millions of Brits who profess themselves "Christian" in the census but for whom that is the end of the matter.
They go to church for weddings and funerals and vaguely believe in some sort of "spiritual God thing", but that's the extent of their commitment.

Their sole purpose seems to be to make the statistics look like we are a nation of fervent believers and regular churchgoers when in fact Sunday in this country is a day for lazing around in front of the TV and most of our professed "Christians" are no more Christian than I am.
Probably considerably less as at least I still read The Bible and try to make sense of it all; the closest to Jesus most people around here get is watching the fucking da Vinci code.

I've been down to my local church on several occasions; the big festivals where you'd expect the place to be packed out.
The most I've ever seen in there is around twenty people and all of those were elderly.
Which for a church that has a catchment area of over five thousand people gives a much clearer indication of the nation's spirituality than the official statistics.

I'm not knocking any genuine Christians out there, but I'd dearly love to see how the statistics would change it they added a category to official forms that gave you the option under religion of ticking a box marked:
"Yes, I believe in some sort of God … well not "God" actually, but I feel there has to be something out there, you know … er … bigger … something spiritual … otherwise where do you go when you die?"

Sigh …
Sorry I'm waffling. It just ticked me off when I saw that on the form.
As you can probably guess from yesterday lack of a post and today's heap of crap my brain relaxed at Chrismas and has yet to restart. I kicked it with some coffee in the city this morning but there's still nothing happening in there.
Maybe later.

Ho, Ho and Ho Again

A very Merry Christmas to all my lovely Blogville neighbours from Scroogey Old Dive.

I'm afraid I can't give you all nice presents to open so instead please enjoy a couple of my favourite festive things.

And The Runners Up …

Fuck me, it's Christmas Eve!

Wars, famine, economic meltdown, the world is going down the shitter, Jesus has returned, been arrested for being a beardy arabic man and is currently in Gitmo and what are people doing about it?
Bickering about their fucking relatives because it's Christmas.

Well, bugger all that.
Here - for want of any inspiration and because after the past few days of Hell I am spending the day chilling - are a few rejects from this year's competition to become Old Dive's Christmas Card.

So if you didn't like this year's card, choose one of these for your mantelpiece:

As usual, click on them to make them bigger … er

Murillo's "Adoration of the Willie".

Caravaggio's "You should have seen the one that got away! You could have fed five thousand with it!"

An All American Christmas.

And a warning to the girls in my office.

Merry Christmas one and all!

More From The Book Of Dive

1. And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
2. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria).
3. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judæa, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
5. To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
6. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
7. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the Inn.
8. For the innkeeper spake thus: "You should have booked. We're always full at Christmas."
9. And verily the inn was filled with the shouting and giggling of weemen, the shrieking harpies of Old Dive's admin department,
10. Who - since last Friday - did spend much of each working day vexing and troubling Old Dive by hitting the bottle during morning coffee break and not stopping until they did fall on their arses.
11. Yea, verily; they were totally shitfaced by noon.
12. And they did play loudly upon their Christmas CDs and did sing heartily and lustily though sadly not in anything resembling a tune.
13. And having drainéd four bottles of red wine, two of white and two of champagne before lunch (there being but six of them) they did drive Old Dive from his office on Friday.
14. And again yesterday.
15. And this morning they have donnéd their silly hats and festooned their bodies in tinsel for the further testing of the patience of Old Dive.
16. And yea, they are giggly and their faces are shiny from wine and chocolate.
17. And glitter.
18. And yea, they do flirt in a manner that would scare the crap out of Bill Clinton.
19. And Old Dive sayeth: "Job had it fucking easy".
20. And Joseph did look in at the window and did exclaim "Holy crap, Mary! Look how these painted strumpets do celebrate the birth of Jesus."
21. And the Holy Family did load up their ass and did get the hell out of Dodge.
22. And the rest of us did head straight for Hell in a handcart.

Happy Christmas, Rich

This one's for our Rich, who picked up on the extreme dodginess of yesterday's last photo.
To go with that photo, here's a Christmas song (yes, you heard; curmudgeonly Old Dive is posting a Christmas song) from more innocent days.

Do listen to all of this. It starts a bit crappily but after the first minute you'll begin to see what made this a kiddies' favourite back in the days when songs about … er … pædophilia could be happily sung around the playground.
Play it to your own kids on Christmas morning. The little tykes will merrily sing it all day long.

Happy Christmas, Blogville!

Hey, it's the twenty-first of smegging December already!

I've just finished my annual Christmas card run so I thought now would be as good a time as any to deliver yours, too.
Plus of course, a lot of you bugger off over the holidays and have fun with your friends and families instead of staying home alone and moaning about having no life, like all good bloggers should.

So …
Happy Christmas to all in Blogville, with love from Old Dive.

Click on it, print it off and put it on your mantelpiece to offend your relatives.

And here are my previous two years' Christmas cards in case anyone missed them or wants to be offended all over again.

Christmas 2006

Christmas, 2007

Plus this … I just love this.

Ho, ho, ho …

Filler Post With Real Hair

Phil and Dive went Christmas shopping this morning.
Holy crap! It was festive Hell!
I used up all my swearwords on other people so all I have left now (other than a shitload of presents to wrap) is a couple of signs that tickled us and that Phil snapped with his cameraphone.

We love it when Health and Safety legislation goes to ridiculous extremes.
This was Marks and Spencer being very silly indeed.

Don't you just love the word "fecund"?
And you can just imagine your loved ones unwrapping this on Christmas morning:
"Wow! You got me some real hair! Just what I've always wanted!
And it's PINK!"

As this is a filler post I shall fill it up with more classic stupid signage we've spotted.

After the last two "collectibles" posts, this seems apt.
"Stuff your own collectible animal".
Hmm … bestiality and kapok; a fine combination.

This was Boots, selling booze in the baby food aisle.
The sign at the top of the photo explains a lot about our kids today.

Tasty!
If ever you're caught short in John Lewis and you're peckish, too, you can kill two birds with one stone.
Eww!

Christmas shopping.
Nuff said …

Lemony, Love, Loss And A Werepig

Holy frijole, that SkyMall catalogue is such fun. I shall be revisiting it before long (probably during the holidays when I will have the time to scan crap).

Our own English crapfest catalogues (the bewilderingly kitsch Argos gift catalogue and the WTF-fest Innovations catalogue - thanks for the reminder, Lynn) are almost as bad and I shall endeavour to get hold of copies to reassure our Colonial Cousins that they are not alone in their inexplicable yen for tasteless tackiness.

The "collectible" trash in SkyMall reminded me of a dear friend who once got bitten by the "collectible" bug.
Well not just bitten but comprehensively savaged …

So … Are you sitting comfortably?
If not, arm yourself with a cup of coffee and a nice biscuit and settle in for a true yet tedious tale of love and loss among the SkyMall people.

Once upon a time there lived in Norwich a girl called Lemony.
Lemony was my secretary for several years; a sweet, pretty girl, very good at her job, great fun to have around the office, made a good cup of coffee, filed like a dæmon and indeed was quite normal in almost every respect.
Talk to her for any length of time, however, and it became apparent that something was missing in there.

Lemony had lived all her life with her oddball mother in a house full of feathery screeching, psittacosis and birdshit (made even more maddening by being located right under the flightpath at the end of the airport runway) but was now spreading her own wings at last in her late twenties and had bought herself a nice little house.
When I popped round to see it, what was missing in Lemony became apparent; she possessed not one scintilla of a real life outside of her deranged batshit-for-brains mother and the dreary office.
Much to my dismay, however, she soon found a purpose in life … she began to collect "collectible heirlooms".

For want of anything to do one dreary Sunday afternoon Lemony fell victim to one of those awful Franklin Mint ads and "invested" half a week's wages in a "collectible" plate … basically a dinner plate with a picture of a cat on it, excitingly "created by a world famous collectible artist" who nobody had ever heard of.

Nice …
"That's very pretty, Lemony, but I do think it was a little expensive for a dinner plate with a picture of a cat on it."

Against my cynical advice that wasting her money on these things would not pay her pension, sweet yet empty little Lemony started on a spending spree, plundering her savings account and filling her sweet yet empty little house with hundreds of these appalling, ugly, cheap and trashy "heirloom investments".
She - with more than a little help from Franklin Mint - convinced herself that these worthless pieces of crap would gain exponentially - indeed miraculously - in value and that in a few years she would be able to prove me wrong and pay off her mortgage by selling a few to slavering fellow collectors.

What made all of this even harder to watch was that Lemony somehow managed to find a kindred spirit in one of Elaine's cast-off Marks (Elaine from the tax office spent several years serial-dating guys called Mark, to whom she referred as Mark 1, Mark 2, Mark 3, etc. This was not a conscious decision to start with but after the first three she decided to roll with it and kept going up to Mark 7).

Anyhoo … Mark 4 and Lemony hit it off straight away. She came in to the office floating on a cloud of cheap perfume and googly-eyed bliss.
Lemony in love was quite a sight.
Perhaps - I thought foolishly - now she actually has a life she will stop wasting her money on this crap.
Hey ho …

A brief aside:
Mark 4, although a pretty nice guy in most other respects, was in fact a werepig.
Outside of a full moon, werepigs are a lot easier to spot than werewolves - and mercifully less dangerous; simply place a finger under your nose and lift it up so your nostrils face forward.

Werepig.

You know the word "retrousé"? Well, use it as a euphemism if you want, but there's no hiding from the fact that it's a werepig.
You probably know some yourselves. You chat away to them at the water cooler but you can't remember a word they've said as your attention is drawn wholly to the contents of their nose which they are pointing straight at you.
Pray they don't sneeze.
Anyhoo, werepigs are perfectly normal for most of the month but the day after a full moon they wake up naked in your vegetable patch having rooted up all your carrots and trashed your kitchen looking for your truffle oil.

And Lemony was dating one …
Pretty soon one thing led - as it does with tedious inevitability - to another and I found myself helping Mark 4 to move in to Lemony's house one Saturday.
The cause of their mutual attraction soon became clear as we opened his boxes: to the house full of "collector plates" was added several dozen "collectible reproduction antique firearms" (made of plastic) and a quite awe-inspiring quantity of Star Trek, Star Wars and Doctor Who memorabilia and figurines.
It was a match made in "collectible" Heaven!

We started playing a rather cruel game at work.
We got hold of a copy of our own version of SkyMall, the Argos Gift Catalogue and went through it, placing bets on which of the monstrously crappy kitsch items Lemony and her werepig would choose to grace their home.
One of the things we picked was a quite hideous white porcelain "sculpture" (straight out of a mould) of a pair of praying hands. They had a little gap between them and you were supposed to put your TV remote in there.

Boy, did we hit the jackpot with that one! There on the coffee table in front of Lemony's sofa were three (you heard) of these monstrosities, each holding a remote for their TV, video and "home entertainment centre".

Anyhoo, within a worryingly few weeks Lemony and the Mark 4 werepig were marrried and we waved them off on their honeymoon; a two week coach tour of Germany and Austria during which they learned that they had nothing in common outside of collecting "collectibles" and by the end of the second day they could not stand to be in the same room together, let alone jammed against one another on a coach.

They grimly stuck it out for the whole two weeks as neither of them had been abroad before and they didn't want to waste the holiday, but as soon as they got home the Mark 4 werepig was ejected from Lemony's house together with his plastic "collectible reproduction antique firearms" and his nutjob hoard of sci-fi trash.

Lemony - much to her credit - took stock of her life and reined in her "collectible" collecting, boxing the whole shebang up and shoving it all in the attic.
Once the mutually agreed interspecies divorce came through she sold up (redeeming her collection at less than a hundredth of what she had paid for it - each of her "investments" revealed to be worth slightly less than a second hand dinner plate) and moved to the southern colonies where she appears - from the occasional email - to be leading a normal life as a slightly batty but sweet expat Englishwoman.

Make of this sorry tale what you will, but I advise you to never buy anything advertised as "collectible" or "heirloom" and to stay the fuck away from werepigs.

This has been a public service broadcast.

Culture Schlock

Tis the season to wallow in greed and genefluct at the feet of Mammon and so it's time once again to indulge in a raucous chortle at the expense of the culturally challenged at Christmas.

I had heard rumour - from Robyn and Katie - that these things existed, but until Amanda returned from a recent trip to the US I had - like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and an edible American cheese - doubted their existence.

"I saw this and thought of you" she said as she handed me a copy of that Holy Grail of tacky kitsch crapola …

The Sky Mall catalogue!
Yay!

Ah, me … Be still my beating heart.
The whole office gathered round and we spent a productive half hour laughing our breakfasts out of our noses at the essentials of an American Christmas.
Boy, howdy!
This is the pinnacle; the very height of high camp trash.
In fact you can't get much higher than 39,000 feet above the Bible Belt, which is where Amanda tracked this thing down.
And which is about as close as any sane person wants to get to Middle America.

Here then, for your puerile entertainment is a small selection of Christmas presents you never knew you didn't want.
Celebrate the birth of Jesus the American way … Step with me into a wonderland of cheesy horror …

First (and worst) up: The Thomas Kinkade "Animated Holiday Tree".

Please, PLEASE, click on these and read the blurb for each item; it is funnier by far than anything I could write about them.

Until Robyn pointed me in his direction a couple of years back I had never heard of Thomas Kinkade.
What I saw on Google Image Search made me want to tear down my collection of paintings and prints from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to burn my collection of modern art and replace it all with … er …
Actually, I would rather rip my eyes out of their sockets than look at any more of Thomas Kinkade's alleged "art".
This is only one of a dozen such kitsch monstrosities in the catalogue. They left me reeling with nausea.
And there are other "collectible artists" in there, too. Maybe we shall return one day and frighten ourselves some more …
But for now:

Woohoo! An animated k.d. lang!
Er …
I love the fact that this has motion sensors in it and will regale passers-by with a "famous Elvis remark".
I always felt there was something missing from my recording studio and now I know that this is not it.

Oh, merciful Heavens!
"No tree branches to get in the line of sight as your guests view up to 120 of your prettiest ornaments!"
Holy fuck!
Okay, fess up … Who has one of these?

If your neighbour gets in first this year with a lifesize illuminated Nativity Scene, simply plough 'em into the lawn with this … um … well actually words fail me.
"It's fourteen feet long! Eat that, Holy Family!"

The American penchant for festive lawn decorations has long bemused me. Over here in Blighty this kind of thing is reserved exclusively for our version of trailer trash, the Chav family.

I can just see these appearing on Essex council estates among the burnt-out cars and abandoned pushchairs.

Ah, now we're talking!

"Thanks to Time Mug you can have a clever alternative to glancing at your watch during long meetings."
Meet "The World's First And Only 100% Dishwasher Safe, Time-Telling Drinkware."
This is truly what the modern Christmas is all about.
Bugger peace on Earth and goodwill to all men; forget celebrating the birth of Christ, let's just get shitfaced, snog workmates and give one another non-presents like this.
Sigh …
Time to point out - as I do every year - that an anagram of "Christmas Day" is "Mad, Scary Shit".

Hey! Trust!
The foundation stone of any lasting relationship.
Let's blow it out of the water with this paranoid piece of shit.
Show your loved ones just how much respect you have for them by secretly tracking their movements.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Click on this one and read it … Oh, PLEASE read it!

Fucking, fuckity fuck.
"Fact!" - Pseudoscience gets madder and sadder every day.

Er …

I truly love this catalogue!
"Bring laid-back comfort to your favourite sporting events …"
Holy crap! This would look great in the grandstand at a rugby match.
Be the laughing stock of your friends and anyone else passing by.
String yourself up like a fat, beer-swilling puppet from the back of a truck.

I'll stop today with this …
Again, words fail me.

And I've not even touched on the awful things in the catalogue for children and pets!
This is too rich a gold mine of mirth for one post.
We shall return another day to point and laugh at those of little brain who actually buy this shit.

In the meantime, I am placing my orders, so look out!