Monday, October the 10th, 2005

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Peas

They're small, green, solid, edible spheres, and you eke them from pods. I am talking about peas, of course! Let us sing their praises:

At the dinner tables of Hooting Yard / There's a food we hold in high regard / Oh I wonder what can it be? / It's the little green edible sphere called the pea!

The shelling of peas has long been recognised as a therapeutic activity on a par with pig observation. Some doctors of the brain recommend that neurasthenic patients should spend an hour each day shelling peas and another hour leaning over the fence of a sty watching pigs. The experimental psychiatrist Tarpin Paltrow suggested doing both at the same time, with results that have been hotly debated ever since.

It was Paltrow's student P K Spaceman who coined the term PQ, for pea quotient. Your PQ is easily calculated. Take the number of peas you have eaten in your lifetime, and divide it by your age. This figure can be plotted on a grid against, for example, your body mass index, rotundity of head, shoe size, and various phrenological data. Dr Spaceman was fond of citing Lloyd George's view that Neville Chamberlain had “a wrong-shaped head” and put this down to a lack of peas in the latter's diet. Sometimes he attributed it to a lack of peas in the former's diet, too.

In desperate circumstances, for example when one's life is at risk, peas can become useful tools, or at least adjuncts to tools. There is the story of the Antarctic explorer, clinging by his frostbitten fingertips to the edge of a crevasse down which he was about to plunge, who managed to clamber up on to the ice by fashioning a harness using ribbons, elastic bands and frozen peas.

The out-of-print pamphleteer Dobson once planned to write an Encyclopaedia Of Pea Varieties And Pea Recipes, but he abandoned the project after cracking his shin bone on a metal drum. The drum had been left directly outside his front door by a peripatetic person who ought to have been shelling peas and observing pigs, for this person could say, as Stanley Baldwin did, “My inside is a mess of cold rumbling fluidity. My brain is costive. Faith is dying. Hope is dead”. So miserable was this travelling drum person that he could no longer bear to carry his drum from place to place, and so with a sigh like a dying wind he unhitched it from his back and placed it in Dobson's driveway. Then he rolled it as far as the front door, and scribbled a note on the wrapper of a toffee apple, weighted the note on the drum with a pebble, and trudged away to begin his life anew as the Man of Bandages. You might be wondering what the note said. It was simple enough.

“I can no longer carry my metal drum from place to place. Keep it or discard it, I care not a jot.”

As we have seen, upon discovering the drum, Dobson's first act was neither to keep nor to discard it, but to bang his leg against it with such force that he almost broke the bone of the shin of his right leg.

Why did Dobson's leg meet the cold hard edge of the metal drum with such force?

Because Dobson was charging out of his house at high speed—so fast that he would have appeared to any passer by as a mere blur, like the comic book character Billy Whizz.

Dobson was normally slow and even lumbering of gait. On what account was he in such a hurry?

Always a man with an eye for a bargain, Dobson had just received a message on his metal tapping machine telling him that in a marquee tent pitched in a field beyond Pang Hill, a mountebank was selling many peas at prices that were described as “insane”. Given that he was thinking hard about his planned pea book, this seemed an opportunity too good to miss. Hence the way in which he jumped up from his escritoire, sending his chair clattering behind him, kicked off his toofles with vim, enwrapped himself in his big black coat, stuck his feet into a pair of Canadian Forestry Service boots, and whizzed out of his front door. His momentum was at this point brought to a shocking halt by the unexpected metal drum blocking his path. Making contact with it, Dobson howled. Many people in the vicinity said later that they thought what they heard was a dog being clubbed by a brute, a la Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist, as played by the late Oliver Reed in the film version of Lionel Bart's musical Oliver! Persistent rumours that Bart intended to follow this with a setting of another Victorian literary gem, Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem The Wreck Of The Deutschland, entitled The Tall Nun!, are unfounded.

Did Dobson read the note left by the peripatetic person who had abandoned the metal drum?

No he did not. Nor, once his shin wound was anointed with unguents and wrapped in a bandage, did he go to the marquee tent in the field to buy peas from a mountebank at “insane” prices. Had he done so, he would have discovered that the insanity of the prices lay not in their cheapness but, conversely, in the fact that each individual pea was on sale for a sum so staggeringly expensive that it beggared belief. Many historians of the social scene have pondered the motives of the mountebank, who was not trying to pretend there was anything special about the peas he had for sale. Indeed, his patter, if we can call it that, consisted of the repeated phrase “Come hither and buy yourself a pea at an insanely expensive price, townspeople!”, shouted in an accent difficult to pin down, and shouted repeatedly throughout the long afternoon as clouds scudded across the sky and birds sang, and the planets span in space millions of miles away.

Peas have been compared with planets, sometimes, by poets. The author of the song we heard at the beginning of this piece wrote other pea-related verses, in one of which he takes each planet in turn—using the mnemonic “mud, vinegar, ectoplasm, moorhens, jasper, straubenzee, unspeakable, Nixon, popinjay” — and contemplates them as peas in a pod, not yet shelled by one of Dr Spaceman's wild-eyed brain-sick patients. There is no mention of pigs in the poem. Make of that what you will.