............CHUCK HARRIS
Le
Porc
Entier
It' s blue beanie day today. Sometimes I have this gloomy tendency to sit here staring at the Amstrad and thinking about Immortality and Am I Getting Enough. Or, rather, will I? Immortality I mean. Up aloft, Time' s winged chariot
is flapping away like a sword of Damocles in a Force Eight gale. Eventually,
no, dammit, who knows when? Tomorrow maybe, or any year now, and
almost certainly within the next twenty, they' ll shovel dirt onto my chip-
board veneered lid, and about ten minutes later I' ll be Chuchy Who. . . . . ?
You know, old Chuchy, the deaf lecher. . . . . . . . .
Now, at the Staverton Park Golf and Country
Club they have come up with a sort of answer
for those of us, unsung, unlauded, miserably
hacking away in the rough ( it' s an obnoxious
exasperating Scottish game and I wish now I' d
chosen something decent and English like cricket
or bear-baiting) , who yearn for our names to be
legion and our fame extolled for evermore.
It' s pretty simple. You give them a small
photograph and a large handful of money and
they superimpose you ( or rather your likeness) ,
over the Club' s motto ( I can never remember the
Latin phrase but it roughly translates out as
" Whose turn is it to buy the next round? " ) , onto
a handsome bone china ashtray.
Or, . . . wait, . . . for a few dollars more, you
could finish up on a sweetmeat dish with your
eclectic, best ever scorecard in the background.
You see, this way you are instantly an
Heirloom. Age will not wither etc. . . you can sit on
the coffee table for all eternity to be marvelled at,
even venerated perhaps, by you great great
grandchildren who will ignore the filter stub or
the bubblegum stuck in your left earhole.
And yes, I know, there' s nothing very remarkable about this.
Unforgettability comes in all shapes and sizes. All the best sites are
already taken, but if you can afford it you can still opt for a nice statue like
Nelson. It comes expensive but if you' ve left all your money to TAFF (and
so you should) , you could still come downmarket a bit, and maybe settle for
a little tree with a discreet bronze label proclaiming your generosity, and
love of the environment.
Or, if you want, how about stealing an idea from France and Italy?
They do a nice line in memorials. You can have your full Kodacolour
unretouched portrait (preferably with a pious expression) , encased in a
plastic insert in your tombstone. All very poignant and reasonably priced.
I've spent a lot of time on this, and it's not easy to come up with a
truly original idea. I did consider marketing Chuchy Harris Gin to slip me
into the Hall of Fame alongside Jim Beam and Jack Daniels, but my good
friend Gordon pre-empted my spot years ago.
Personally though, I think that, for Mundanes as well as golfers, the
Staverton Park Golf and Country Club ashtrays and sweetmeat dishes might
be better, and, well, safer. It' s cheap and decent. As a Founder Member I
could probably negotiate a small discount if you are really interested. At
the very least, you won' t get diarrhetic birds crapping on your tricorne hat
or stray dogs widdling on your insert.
And you should
remember, even elegant
tombstones aren' t
tamper-proof. When
the Prime Minister of
England, the hated
Viscount Castlereagh,
committed suicide in
1822 his fanclub built
a huge ornate memorial
for him high in the
Pennines --weeping
angels, laurel wreaths,
broken columns, real
Italian marble, lapis
lazuli, The Lot, no
expense spared.
Sadly, the granite
slab incised with the
original laudatory
inscription is long
forgotten. Within
months it was overlaid
by a very unofficial
plaque indeed. . . . . .
" Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler place than this.
Here lies the grave of Castlereagh,
Stop traveller, and . . . . "
* * * * * *
Now, I wouldn' t want you to get the wrong idea about all this. I write
not for myself alone. Believe me, there is something about the sight of a
grown man busily massaging his own ego that makes me wish he had taken
a cold shower instead. Honest! I' m not like that at all.
But. . . . . I am Chuchy Harris, Trufan. For me, and probably for you, too,
fandom is not the raison d' etre of Humanity, it' s not the be all and end all
of Civilisation. It' s a lot more serious than that, isn' t it?
It' s okay for 4e, Burbee, Towner, Terry Carr, ATom, Brian Burgess,
Walter Himself and Claude Degler, LeeH, Tucker, Block and Ossie Mandias --
all golden immortals until the last scrap
of twiltone crumbles to dust --but what
about us hoi polloi, I ask you, . . . . . us
nonentities, us half-remembered heroes
of The Usuals? You know, and I know
deep-down, there' s very little chance
indeed of them re-christening a Hugo as
a Chuchy.
Sure, there' s always the Curator of
Books and Manuscripts at the British
Museum, Ghod bless him. The Law
says (or said) , that he gets a copy of
everything in print. He had pride of place
on every faned' s mailing list, and woe
betide you if you failed to send him every
issue. We sent him SLANT. We sent him
HYPHEN. We sent him the VARGO
STATTEN MAGAZINE, Volume 1, Number
3. We are all on a shelf, or a heap, some-
where. If you had a lifetime or two to
spare, you could crawl thru the archives to trace them and find yourself a
Chuchy Harris, or for that matter, a Norman G Wansborough anthology. . . .
I guess there' s no real satisfactory answer. It' s not only a proud and
lonely thing. It' s instantly forgettable, too.
. . . . . . . . . . I think I' ll settle for a tree. I know where I can get a nice little Japanese Maple for a couple of quid. It' s a nice kind of memorial, and when all those lovely crimson leaves drop down onto the lawn in the
autumn, generations of aching Harrises still to come will rest on their rakes
and curse me for not choosing a fancy sweetmeat dish.
I think I' d like that.
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Updated November 20, 2002. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.