Bible – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

January tweets

Organ-grinding tweets for December

Xmas &c.

If any would not work neither should he eat: Walthamstow workhouse.

August’s tweets from London’s Singing Organ-Grinder

Bit late. Twitter trouble. Apologies for any distress caused. Money-back guarantee applies.

A remarkable gravestone in Waltham Forest Muslim cemetery

If tears could build a stairway / And memories a lane, / We’d walk right up to heaven / And bring you home again.

The true origins of an 18th century tomb inscription at Zennor, Penwith, Cornwall

“‘Tis glorious misery to be born a man,” generally taken to refer to a hen-pecked husband, is in fact a misquotation of verse by the 17th century Romford and London poet, Francis Quarles, dealing with human mortality.

Winchester is the centre of English civilisation

Sez Lucio Vicente López in Recuerdos de viaje (1881). This is apparently in part due to the Normans having invaded without women, thus enabling the maintenance of The Saxon Character. He’s wrong. Winchester is suspiciously continental, while Romsey is Ethelflaeda, who sang psalms while skinny-dipping in the Test, and lithe & lusty hooligans.

The debasement of the European mind

A populist US senator meets an Italian organ-grinder in Rome in 1859.

Did the house that Jack built come from Spain?

Or, How to cook the old lady who swallowed a fly without stooping to cannibalism. Cumulative songs (and monstrous nested stuffing recipes) in Quixote and Estebanillo González, with the grossest video you’ll see today.

Cruikshank, The progress of passion (1792).

Christmas carousels

Impossible automata for my street organ this holiday season. Featuring Georg Büchner, Ignaz Bruder, German Christmas pyramids, dancing Hasidim, Lieutenant Kijé as you’ve probably never seen it, Le Tigre, and a crustacean.

Hackney Brook restoration scheme

Iain Sinclair wrote of when “global warming rolls a warm sea [up] the course of the old Hackney Brook.” The flow’s going to be the other way. Let me explain.