Ring Road by Ian Sansom

his
Phaedrus,
in the story of wise King Thamus of Egypt and the inventions of the god Theuth. Francie, however, has not read widely outside the Bible and devotional literature, so he is not familiar with what Barry in Philosophy for Beginners (Lecture 6: ‘Epistemology’) calls the ‘obvious connection between
Phaedrus,
commodity fetishism, and our symbolic lives and psychic habits’. Francie simply calls his discussions ‘FDFX?’ (Fully Devoted Followers of Christ), and is encouraging more prayerful texting.
    * See Bob Savory’s
Speedy Bap!,
chapter 12, ‘Sandwiches à la Turque’.
    * Victor Russell, a supercilious man with a Hitler moustache, who was the owner-manager of the Troxy and who wore a white tuxedo every day of his working life, was convicted in 1989 of arson and fraud: he’d torched the Troxy, trying to cash in on a £25,000 insurance policy. He died in disgrace, in prison up in the city, his moustache intact but his tuxedo long since gone. His wife, Doreen, and daughter, Olivia, now live abroad, near Nîmes, in France, where Olivia is a dealer in art deco antiques. Doreen tells her story in a moving interview with Minnie Mitchell in the
Impartial Recorder,
22 August 2001.
    * She missed musicals, though – musicals seemed to have gone out of fashion.
Hello, Dolly!
she’d enjoyed, back in the old days, with Barbra Streisand, and
Sweet Charity
even, with Shirley MacLaine, although that was a bit weird. And Liza Minnelli,
Cabaret,
of course. They were classics. But you couldn’t get to see a good musical in our town these days for love nor money, unless you counted Colette Bradley’s amateur youth theatre productions of
Fiddler
on the Roof
and
Oliver!
at the Good Templar Hall, which are OK but which are lacking in a certain something – lavish sets, for example, and costumes, lighting, full orchestras, Topol, Ron Moody; pretty much everything, in fact, that makes a good musical a good musical.
    * For a full account of the ongoing dog-fouling controversy, see the
Impartial Recorder,
‘Letters to the Editor’, 1982–Present.
    * This, of course, seems unlikely, but it’s not impossible: there are happy endings, even for fish and the proverbial tin soldier. On 19 May 1991 the
Impartial Recorder
ran a story about Monica Hawkins (née Williams), from the Longfields Estate, who went on holiday to the Isle of Man in 1971, aged twenty-one. While swimming in the sea she lost a solid-silver locket which had been a gift to her from her mother, and which contained a small gold tooth, her father’s only mortal remains after he’d been cremated at what was then the town’s newly opened crematorium on Prospect Road. Twenty years later, at a car boot sale in the car park at the Church of the Cross and the Passion, not half a mile from the crematorium on Prospect Road, Mrs Hawkins, by that time twice married and twice widowed, happened to be going through a pile of costume jewellery in an old Quality Street tin when something caught her eye – a locket just like the one she’d lost all those years ago. And on opening the locket she found and yes, the gold tooth. The stallholder could offer no explanation of how she had acquired the locket – she bought bags of stuff from men in pubs – and after Mrs Hawkins’s death her daughter Joanne bequeathed the tooth to P. W. Grieve, the dentist who as a young man had made the gold tooth for Mr Williams in the first place, back in the 1960s, and who now has the tooth proudly on display in his waiting room, along with a bible open at the passage, ‘The law of thy mouth is better unto me than thousands of gold and silver’ (Psalms 119:72).
    * The Woolly Hat for Seamen Scheme has long since been abandoned: the Mission now seeks instead to provide every sailor of every nation with a small, waterproof, shockproof CD player and an evangelistic CD containing hymns, sermons and