Day 17

The Academy for the Awfully Awfully Frightfully Frightfully Nice


08.59 My right ventricle has disappeared
Subject: Niceties

Dearest Darling Forsythia,


As my Life’s Work, I really ought to do something frightfully frightfully nice. It will be my raison d’être.

This epiphaneal stroke of wonderment and self-satisfaction came to me last night, whilst I was entertaining my required quota of unpleasant thoughts and vicious rantings, and it seemed to be that my future will be defined by two opposing vocations: Outright torture of practically everyone, and the relentless elevation of the awfully awfully, frightfully frightfully nice.

Are you awfully nice? Would you qualify for inclusion in the Academy for the Awfully Awfully Frightfully Frightfully Nice®?

Have you ever picked a scab from your scalp whilst others are partaking of their crème brûlé? Have you ever burrowed deeply into your left ear with your finger and sucked the end? Do you constantly pick your nose and recycle? Have you ever had carnal thoughts while perusing the poussin en gelée in Fauchon?

If you have answered no to these and to the other ninety-five deeply moral questions on the application form, chances are good but faint that you might be eligible for enrolment in the Academy for the Awfully Awfully Frightfully Frightfully Nice®, the latest lifestyle concept from the imaginers responsible for The Floating Statues of the Blessed Virgin™ National Park® and the scintillating Miraculous Almostasanta Ruchl™ Immaculata™ Ultimata™ Cheese Company™ and Vaginal Washes™ Gamemaster Experience®.

All pupils will be required to wear our distinctive uniforms: Comme des Garçons for the women; Dsquared2 for the men; Agent Provocateur for the fabulously undecided; Alexander McQueen’s Givenchy cast offs for the ruthlessly undecided (and their cats). First the uniforms, then the content. What should be the colour scheme you ask? Dust and aspidistra. With just a hint of gloom and cheery sunshine (from the Chez des Trois Pralines “Retro Latrine” Collection), as befitting our corporate statement No. 769/8/2b/000005691.5, sub-clause 54.a, pertaining to our endeavours to make this a better world in the event all else fails.

In as much as it will be a testament and memorial to my creative genius and a life spent in pursuit of the very little and sublime, I shall work tirelessly on this newest and most ingratiating of projects. This and this alone shall hold the key to my immortality. And as my best friend at least until further notice, I expect you to constantly remind me of the glory that shall be mine. Without you I shall fail; this is my solemn promise.


In the mean time, while you are getting used to the idea, may I suggest that you concentrate on your niceness quotient? It is, I fear, greatly, perhaps hopelessly, underdeveloped. You must accustom yourself to thinking nice thoughts. One per every three weeks to begin with, increasing the number gradually until you become a shining beacon and people slam the door in your face and insult you to your face instead of behind your back. Develop a nice smile, preferably one reeking sincerity, as well as the habit of fervently clasping your hands at odd and inappropriate moments. Buy your saintly Mumsy an unbecoming hat, something in a pastel totally exuding physical appeal. Matching high-healed pumps, as well. Mothers of the awfully awfully frightfully frightfully nice often wear pastel pumps in becoming yet repulsive colours. And while you are about it, have her measured for a snood. Snoods will make her complexion come alive. She should wear them, as many as possible, within her house at all times, and when without, perhaps she could cover them with a fashionable yet shabby Double Terais in virulent puce. Tasteful but not suitable for a woman of her advanced years, especially one who was formerly a mother but who is now, as an almostasaint, thoroughly cleansed, scrubbed and re-virginised. She should, in her blessed neo-fecundity, be discouraged from playing music that is not raucous, lewd or suggestive. Tangos are acceptably nice, though not when played in a recognisable key. She should undertake to prepare weekly candlelight suppers featuring light entertainment and soft pink and blue food and to undergo carbolic douches. Musically, we do sanction musicals, providing they were composed by Friml and only Friml. I do recommend a hearty diet of French art songs, but only those whose composers steeped in absinthe and living in garrets after achieving oblivion and huge financial rewards. Beware of composers pretending to be French and only speaking through their noses when it suits them. They may be Swiss or, God forbid, Canadian. Classical scribblers should also be approached with caution, accepting, of course, the austerily obscure and any Romantics with pre-Raphaelite tendencies and raw sexual tension. Please avoid all clinical new music; anything more recent than Schoenberg should be classified as liberal elitism, especially those savage twelve-tone exercises designed for bowel inflection.

Lest you feel swamped, I shall shortly provide you with a helpful list of life instructions in the art of truly wonderful niceness for your guidance and edification. In a nonce, I shall continue with more nicely nicely constructive elucidations. - HWISGAAOMRIU®

***

12.35 Why won’t you send lunch?
Subject: Work?

Dearest Darling Forsythia,


Wonderment, Oh, wonderment. How magnanimous of you, and yet so dreadful! To think that you must part from your dear Marjorie Dribble, if even for an hour or two each day, to return to the halls of justice! Must you really return to work so soon after your fragrant womb has been so rudely deprived of the child? Have you not explained to all and sundry the urgency of “Health Through Bagels and Unbridled Vissisitudity, Depravity and the Sanctity of the Perpetually Filled Wombroom?” You are, my dear Forsythia, invaluable to us, and absolutely essential. If necessary, send our director of marketing out on the streets. If money is needed, then it is she who must get a second job! You are a “U”, and not some common, jam-butty eating tea-swiller, and don’t you forget it.

I continue to spend every available second, I repeat, every available second, on the Solomon Islands development. Greed is dripping from my teeth and clotting my very follicles. I fell I must meditate, meditate, meditate. With every breath I must meditate. Upon waking this morning, or was it yesterday, I could think of nothing but The Chamber of Utter Decay™, perhaps the centrepiece and visual triumph of Oy, Ye, May Purdy Jeezus™ Holiday Camp and Mosquito Colony/Breeding Centre®. We are talking money and expansion and cleaner swimming pools for Darfur. And flavoured purges. Did I not mention flavoured purges? That is where Stalin went wrong. One simply must have flavoured purges! Butchery by itself is never enough. It’s lower class, and you know how I feel about that. Such sadness in the world, and so few faces worth looking at. I die and yet am bored. But enough of me.

I am thankful, yet surprised, that you managed to locate our director of marketing, and that she is sleeping well. Is her depressed state so severe that she now requires extra sleep as part of her benefits package? I do not recall her demands being so extreme when she was gainfully employee at Little Eddie’s Go-Go Lube In and Out™ as a lap dancer and celebrity glamour model. Sleep was the last thing on her mind then. Why have things gone downhill so drastically? Does she not realise that it is the worst of all possible things for one of exploding magnetism? It can lead to things. Please, please watch out for her. She is like a rubbish bin to our organisation. Ugly yet essential. Perhaps if we consider prioritising R&D and outsourcing her modules she might have more energy and time to devote herself unstintingly, unsparingly and unselfishly? Without need for respite or the occasional recreational sex-break. Do you think that would thrill her? More importantly, would it solve the problem, or should we kill her as we should have killed her before, only more nicely?

I must close for now, but shall return just as soon as I can remember what I am thinking about. - HWISGAAOMRIU®

PS. Fuck. Something’s wrong. Please come to the house if you can, or at least telephone my former squatters.

PPS. Silence. Perhaps everything is all right, after all. I can only wait and see. In the mean time, I am frantically worried about the Academy for the Awfully Awfully Frightfully Frightfully Nice® attracting the wrong sort. We must be reasonable and balanced, yet inflexible in matters of integrity. That is why I am so thankful you went to law school.

PPPS. Please don’t think I am taking you for granted. I do so worry about you. How are the fruits of your womb? I am forever concerned about their welfare and wish they weren’t so very pleasing and amenable. It will lead to problems down the line. Please, please, be firm with them; I simply will not permit floppy leit motifs in the escalators of their villas. Chocolate, chocolate, and many bowls of fraise du bois, that is the answer. Taste, and almost too much of it. Servants, too, of course. Whatever you do, however, you must not expose them unreservedly to unsupervised and unedited broadcasts of Eurovision Song Contest, as it is known to cause piles, and they nothing if not ungodly and unbecoming in thongs. When in your children’s company and out of nanny’s earshot, I would prefer if you were to frequently burst out in song. You’ll find a repetitious and floral rendition of “Je t’ame” will prove to be quite satisfactory, especially if it is done at odd and unexpected intervals. Even while at work. That, my dear Forsythia, is precisely what mobile phones are for! For pestering one’s loved ones. Night and day, day and night. Quite naturally, in the distant past, one could have been a nuisance to your nearest and dearest by post and telegram several times per day, but, hélas, that was before we permitted the Amurkuns to teach the world about good service.

PPPPS. Before I forget, please remind me to share more about those dastardly little slots on one’s computers. After weeks of horrible agony and despair, I have come up with a bad case of brilliant ideas. But first I must relent and do my bladder’s bidding.

With passions never ceasing to relent, - HWISGAAOMRIU®

***

14.20 Having eaten my remaining ear
Subject: Swaggly Tits, Rampant

Dearest Darling Forsythia,



FOR THE RECORD:

“In the event we are brought up on charges for corrupting the airwaves or offending the unfortunate, it should be made clear that the term “Swaggly Tits”, rampant or no, is the generic name for a tiny, red-plumed bird with pendulous proportions and tasselled pudenda. It dwells with its mate and seven dung beetles in a white elastic sling. While it does possess at least one song in its repertoire, the bird is obliquely shy and prefers to communicate via miniature bongo drum. Some (the anti-song faction) claim, perhaps unfairly, that it only does this because it hasn’t got a song to begin with. Others, its fervent supporters (the pro-song faction) refute this as scurrilous and unnecessarily sanctimonious, stating categorically “If It Don’t Have a Song, It Should!”

END OF OFFICIAL COMMUNIQUE

That out of the way, I shall now proceed to something remarkably achievable. It is called, in case you were wondering, The Veiled Rippler and its Chamber of Utter Decay®. It is not so much a place, in fact it couldn’t be, what with there bring precious few nasty pockets of poverty left without at least two mega five star golf resorts showing them how things work if only you truly understand the benefits of a market economy. Nor is it a sovereign nation, what with there being precious few of those since Amurka declared themselves masters of the universe. It is, in fact, more than the sum of these two. It is The Ultimate State of Mind™. To achieve it, one must absorb with totality and absolutivity, with the aim of ultimate digestivity, the essence of Blessed Nervana™ (with an ‘e’, not ‘nirvana’ with an ‘i’, which is something altogether different, and to which I have not as yet begun to offend).

Blessed Nervana™! What can I say? With this most ultimate of all ultimates, we shall plumb the very depths and celebrate the essence(s) of Bagel Bareness™. Please, I beg of you, meditate on the following achievements of our Sublime Newness™:

Bagel-in-the-Bare™ Cafes and Ice Cream Parlours®; Bagel-in-the-Bare™ Theme Parks®; Miraculous Almostasanta Ruchl™ Immaculata™ Ultimata ™ Shrines and Laundries®, under the divine leadership and bounteous bosoms of our beloved and adored pipette, Her Holyknees Almostasanta But Next Year A Godletta Rachetila of the Blissful Blossom and Spreading Bottom™, and her realm of saints, sub-saints, demi-saints, sycophants and minions; our agribusiness empire, Santa Rachilita Fields of Onions and Bananas™; and, of course, our vast and all-powerful, ever-persuasive commercial network of blood-sucking, neo-conservative, pseudo-socialist, armpit dwellers-who-are-openly-secretly-planning-to-take-over-The Glorious and Triumphant Grand Duchy of Chlamydeous®.

Our other selves, valiantly led by our reasonable and forgiving Tripe Unionist Brothers of Sisters of the Loire Valley™, will see that the coup fails miserably and bloodily, every other week or so. The point is, what is progress and democracy if there are not frequent massacres to keep us on our toes. Complacency is the enemy of destineous larynx.

I told you I could maintain a rigorous dialogue within myself for an extended time. There! You see? I am a ruptured and foetal corpuscle. AM AM AM. AM AM AM. Not only that, but I shall retain absolute control like some dank and shadowy puppet master. I shall be the nightmare behind the sunshine; the torment behind the agony; the broccoli underneath the crème caramel. A true stoat of stoats, a leader of fungal proportions.

Never mind, back to basics, as various politicians have said to their cost. Quite a catchy slogan, however. Do you think we might store it up for some future political mood-swing? While you are pondering this possibility and it’s ramifications, may I suggest using it for our new range of toddler day and evening wear? “Back to Basics for the Precious and Privileged™”. Brazenly pedantic, no? When I speak those words, I picture dainty pastel boutiques in each of our exquisitely tiny hotels (do try to keep current with our various business enterprises). It will, of course, be expected of all acceptable parents that they be means tested before being allowed to browse. It is simply not done to have the hoi polloi mussing up racks and shelves and drawers and, in general, corrupting the goods on display in search of a bargain. Furthermore, I would prefer that only our Ultra-Triple Black SmurkCard® be accepted. Credit lines with fewer than seven figures are so last year! I mean, what is this business about people who buy in discount shops and boot sales being eligible for plastic? It simply is not acceptable. And what about “customers” who proffer cash, you ask? Well, in my opinion, it is unclean and mostly second-hand. If any is (shudder) proffered, we should have a policy of laundering and ironing it first, even before it is checked for validity. All customers who have ever bought underwear in bulk should be turned away at the door, with violence if necessary, and everyone who attempts to enter, excepting those chosen few who have been invited, must be scrutinised to within an inch of their lives. If they are not our sort, then they will be accused of shoplifting and imprisoned for a very, very long time.

But back to cash. Do you know how many (so-called) people there are who have been allowed to carry money? It is really quite frightening, if not downright appalling. Why, some of them are not even personally acquainted with Manolo Blanik or Jimmy Choo.

Something has just occurred to me. Have you found, as I have, that most of our thoughts (or, at any rate, mine, since you are hopelessly reticent) are good for the ears of the Truly Great™, those who only sing and long for what they ought to want, and only crave what they’re gonna get. Don’tcha think?

But yet again I digress. I am forced to return my attention to work and the glory of our life, in this case Oy, Ye, Mah Purdy Jeezus Holiday Health Spas®. We must plan plan plan. The Veiled Rippler™ must lurk and old dogs must finally have their day.

I simply cannot believe how much clearer I am these days. Haven’t you noticed the improvement in my analytical powers. A sharpening of my intellect? I have, of course, done a frightful amount of studying since I’ve been trapped inside this computer, and that has only been for the good. There has also been considerable progress since my former squatters started bringing me thermos flasks of their special mind-expanding broth. Perhaps you should try some.

I believe our director of marketing is not aware of my multi-media stratagem. - HWISGAAOMRIU®