IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

THE TYPES WERE SPOOFING MADLY WHEN MR YARROW JOINED them in the pub.  Three matches each and you had to guess the total;  they greeted him with clenched fists raised like a party salute:  ‘Come on Yarrow, get them up,’ ‘Room for you in the next round,’ but Mr Yarrow as a rule guessed wrong, and he disliked losing.


‘Be with you in a moment, boys.’  He forced his way through to the bar; behind him the fists were flourished again in the air and the stranger, entering at that moment, stopped in astonishment, believing he had blundered into the beginning of a fight.

From:  Julian Maclaren-Ross, The Dark Diceman (1947), unfinished novel based on the Eugen Weidmann mass-murderer case in Paris, 1939.

Buddy Holly: Learning The Game (Link)

BOY'S OWN

"Epigrammatic," said the King, shaking his finger sadly at him. "None of your daring scintillations here. As to why I don't do it in private, I rather fail to understand your question. The answer is of comparative limpidity. I don't do it in private, because it is funnier to do it in public. You appear to think that it would be amusing to be dignified in the banquet hall and in the street, and at my own fireside (I could procure a fireside) to keep the company in a roar. But that is what every one does. Every one is grave in public, and funny in private. My sense of humour suggests the reversal of this; it suggests that one should be funny in public, and solemn in private. I desire to make the State functions, parliaments, coronations, and so on, one roaring old-fashioned pantomime. But, on the other hand, I shut myself up alone in a small store-room for two hours a day, where I am so dignified that I come out quite ill."

Excerpt from: Gilbert K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, London and New York, John Lane – The Bodley Head, 1904.

Pablo Picasso Images:   

Upper – Clown (1958);   

Lower – Arlequin sur un canapé rouge (1905).