Once More With Footnotes

instruction at their school, don't know the connotations of the name Methuselah (well, one did — he thought it was a type of champagne bot tle, which is strictly speaking correct). People write to me saying: How did you get the idea for this? And this? And I say — it's really true, that really happened, people used to believe this, this really was an old custom. It's terribly tempting to say: Y es, I made it up. But given what human beings have done, practised, and believed in the last ten thousand years, it's quite hard to make up anything new and it's a shame to see the old stuff lost, since I doubt that a great deal of it is now electronic. I f the signposts I can give can get a few people reading real books, and getting a feel for the depth of their society, then I think I'll have done my job.
     

Given the title of the anthology in which this was to appear, I tried to write this as though I was thirteen years old, with that earnest brand of serious amateurishness. This is possibly not a long way from how I write at the best of times ...
     
     
     
     
     

T he S ecret B ook of the D ead
     
    They don't teach you the facts of death,
    Your Mum and Dad. They give you pets.
    We had a dog which went astray.
    Got laminated to the motorway.
    I cried. We had to post him to the vet's.
     
    You have to work it out yourself,
    This dying thing. Death's always due.
    A goldfish swimming on a stall,
    Two weeks later: cotton wool,
    And sen t to meet its Maker down the loo.
     
    The bottom of our garden's like a morg-you
    My Dad said. I don't know why
    Our tortoise, being in the know
    Buried himself three years ago.
     
    This is where the puppies come to die.
    Puss has gone to be a better cat
    My Dad said . It wasn't fair.
    I think my father's going bats
    Jesus didn't come for cats
    I went and looked. Most of it's still there.
     
    They don't teach you the facts of death,
    Your Mum and Dad. It's really sad.
    Pets, I've found, aren't built to last;
    One Christmas pres ent, next Christmas past.
    We go on buying them. We must be mad.
     
    They die of flu and die of bus,
    Die of hardpad, die of scabies,
    Foreign ones can die of rabies,
    But usually they die of us.
     
    When the third Harry Potter book came out, the Sunday Times ask ed me to address the subject of why the British seem to be so keen to write fantasy. I think the full brief was: "We need it by Thursday". When it was printed, as "Fantasy Kingdom", it turned out that some editor had kindly assumed that "numinous" was a m i styping of "luminous" and had changed it. Sigh.
     
     
     
     
     
M agic K ingdoms
     
                  I remember a back garden I used to see from the train. It was a very small garden for a very small house, and it was sandwiched between the thundering railway line, a billboard, and a near-derelict factory.
     
                  I don't know what a Frenchman or an Italian would have made of it. A terrace, probably, with a few potted plants and some trellis to conceal the worst of post-industrial squalor. But this was an Englishman's garden, so he'd set ou t to grow, if not Jerusalem, then at least Jerusalem artichokes. There was a rockery, made of carefully placed concrete lumps (the concrete lump rockery is a great British contribution to horticulture, and I hope one is preserved in some outdoor museum so m ewhere). There was a pond; the fish probably had to get out to turn around. There were roses. There was a tiny greenhouse made of old window frames nailed together (another great British invention). Never was an area so thoroughly gardened, in fact, as tha t patch of cat-infested soil.
     
                  No attempt had been made to screen off the dark satanic mills, unless the runner beans counted. To the gardener, in the garden, they did not exist. They were in another world.
     
                  The British have a talent for creating imagina ry worlds, and there's no doubt that we are major exporters. Joanne Rowling is currently leading the drive. She couldn't be selling more books if her young wizard Harry Potter was Hannibal Lecter's godson. Why are we so at home with fantasy?
     
                  Well, it's i n the air ... almost literally. The early Christian Church helped things along by deliberately refraining from stamping on the pagan religions of the time. Instead, some of their festivals and customs were given a Christian veneer. No doubt this saved a l o t of trouble at