Private joke

I’ve been reading J. R. P. Fisher’s second book “More Than a Year”, a you-should-have-been-there semi-fictionalised muso-and-angst diary from the early Seventies – gigs (active and passive), TOTP, failure, estimations of the nitrogen content of sheep poo, exam traumas, glandular fever, getting lifts from dodgy people, more failure, UCCA applications, influences, alcoholic excesses – in short, frustrated adolescence. What it was like, growing up. I can empathise, although I never had nearly as much fun.

Today, J. R. P. Fisher is of course a living rock legend. Originating from the middle reaches of the Thames Valley, and while famously the composer of the synaesthetic hit “Getting Up (has a green sound)”, few people will be aware that he was also a chemist of startling perception and originality. The sheep poo episode was merely a foretaste of things to come.

I have the good fortune to be able to claim a personal connection, though not, it has to be said, with sheep poo. Some time after the period described in this book I met J. R. P. F. in a professional capacity. In those days, thanks to his inconvenient accumulation of initials and his long hair, he was generally known as H. By chance, we both worked for the same organisation, a household name big in personality modification. H worked in a tiny, airless unit called the Snorting Office. Here, a team of brilliant boffins, including H himself, and team leader Ned Kitwey (who had once just missed the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, having lost the application form amongst the detritus on his desk), spent their days seeking substances for commercially successful products that could be taken via the nasal route. Sniffed, snorted. Things to snort was the Snorting Office’s remit and speciality. H was crucial to this operation.

There’s one morning I remember especially, when – as often - I’d popped down to see Ned about something relating to my organisational role as a Scurrilous Wretch. H was also present. Now then. H was wont to bring his electric guitar into the workplace, and sometimes he attached its output to a mysterious device known simply as “The 108”, which the previous year Ned had rescued from a dustbin behind Bletchley Park. So it was this particular morning. At the time, H was going through a Bryan Zane phase, the “Hunky Doreen” album - as indeed we all were – and,  given his background, he was particularly attracted to songs with a Thames Valley flavour. One of them was called “Life in Marlow?” (the question mark was significant), whose lyrics compared William Tierney Clark’s suspension bridge across the Thames unfavourably with the one he built over the Danube in Budapest. As H strummed and sang the words “It’s a god-awful small affair …” out of The 108 pulsated an astonishing sonic distortion with profoundly disturbing psychological effects upon all those present.

Dee Twinky, who claimed Neanderthal ancestry on both sides, grinned dreamily as she sipped her habitual mid-morning beaker of ammonium hydroxide, while Wendy Tike, who had an artificial hump, was suddenly made whole. Enid Kewty, a professional bear impersonator, glued herself to the ceiling with a marmalade sandwich. Fearing what was about to happen, I had already stuck my fingers in my ears and so escaped the worst of the effects.

Ned was sat hunched over his desk, quill pen dangling from his knees, monocle draped over his left ear, gurgling over the structural formula for something that had been dubbed 13621, a complex tropane alkaloid undergoing assessment for snorting potential. “It’s an ecgonine” derivative, he muttered, meaningfully. As a young man he’d been raised by vicars. “C₁₇H₂₁NO₄”, he growled, salivating lecherously.

“As you do”, H commented coolly, twanging, and then singing something about sailors fighting in a dance hall in Marlow. I pressed myself back against the wall.

“Precisely”, drooled Ned. “None other than 3-(benzoyloxy)-8-methyl-8-azabicyclo-[3.2.1] octane-2-carboxylic acid methyl ester”.

“Well obviously”, said H, “but it will never catch on. No way snappy enough”.

Just at that moment, a woman who looked like an unmade bed with its occupant still inside oozed through the door, snagging several cardigans in the process. This was Di Wetenky, and she was holding a small red can with swirly writing on it.

Ned looked up. “And what have we here?” he asked, peering at her quizzically over his eyebrows in cod Dickensian fashion.

“Coke”, replied his visitor. “It’s a fizzy drink popular with Americans”.

“Splendid, thou scurvy wench”, spluttered Ned, using his watch chain to adjust his mustard coloured sleeveless pullover without elbow patches. “That’s it ! Coke. We’ll call it that. Coke. Splendid”, he spluttered again, whistling his sibilants. I avoided most of the spray as he rose from his chair, ecstatic in the realisation that he and H, between them, had discovered the strongest ever candidate for the world’s best-selling snorting commodity, and not only that, they had a short, snappy name for it too.

H returned to his guitar, unplugged it from The 108, strummed the initial hesitant upward chord progressions of Bryan Zane’s “Ch-Ch-Ch-Chertsey” -  a song bewailing the problems of a chronic stammerer having caught the wrong bus  - and began singing “I still don’t know what I’d been waiting for”. 

Sensing an opportunity, I went back to my own office and forgot all about the episode until, in another life, this week, I read “More Than a Year”. Available from Amazon.