Ice-cream in Offworld

7 September 2000
Victor tells you more lies.

Cabo de S. Vicente is the most south-westerly point of Lusitania, a province known to you people as Portugal. Thereís a lighthouse here, not far from the place where a man with a mad hat decided to form a navigational school, and hence became universally known as The Navigator. This concept is in itself problematic: I realise that here at 'clown' we fart far too much about wordplay and linguistic meaning. I'm sorry for that, and will explain or excuse this only with the now obvious revelation that we are all pretentious sales reps (apart from the nicer ones). Nevertheless, a few phonemes on epithets.

Prince Henry, Infante Dom Henrique to our Lusitanian chums, will forever be remembered for his skill in charting nautical positions, a concept which I appear to have given an unwarranted sensual air. It's a particularly medieval/early modern thing, I think: Vlad the Impaler, Philip the Good of Burgundy, Charles the Bald, Henry the Eighth. Modern equivalents would be Matt the Hat (not to be confused with Jack 'The Hat' McVitie), Clinton the Bintfucker, Van Morrison the Fried. So we're all agreed: we're clearly missing out.

The pharos, aside from enabling fishermen more effectively to direct their bream, marks the end of the (medieval known) world. If you go out of sight of it, you fall off. Because you can. And if the narwhals don't horn you, you end up in a land where pigmies have hairy daughters and dogs for stomachs, where the boinga-boinga game is played with bamboo and the weakest little boys in the initiation and rose-budding is a top ten pastime.

The clashing rocks at the base of the cliff herald the appearance of the Scylla and/or Poseidon in the Clash of the Titans-Jason and the Argonauts-skeletons come from bones sown in the ground and fight Harry Hamlin while Honor Blackman and Laurence Olivier put little statues in the arena-Nigel Green as Hercules comes a cropper due to his greed and carries the blame of his friend's squashing kind of a way. The animation's better in Outlandia.

Offworld? The ultramarine people in fact replicants, Harrison Ford included, his sixty year old mind in a forty year old body. Purr. I get to spray-paint my eyes, do back flips and fraternise, perhaps fornicate, with young and albino Rutger Hauer. But Daniel Auteuil, Morten Harket's thong-clad lower arms and Cartimandua, Queen of the Brigantes are not there, and I fall back into a deep Old World sleep where Cathars delouse each other and Templars give each other mystical and satanic arse kisses.

Not only can one not set forth from the Cape: one is transported to a bazaar in which only ice-cream, sarongs and cocks of Barcelos are pedalled. A big ginger man hands me a cappuccino Cornetto, and I awake to find that a seagull has shat on the car.

In the real Lusitanoutlandia, there's a local archaeological museum (Lagos) that houses some of the most fantastic chimeras. Accompanying the usual Algarve folklore tat and the oh-so-remarkable cork icons, there is a collection donated by a notable taxidermist and proto-veterinary, a collection which shall henceforth be known as the Pickled Puppy Pet Prodigy. 4P consisted of stuffed animals the like of which crowns the art of Bosch and Brueghel - grotesque realism and the carnivalesque afforded to the realm of the demonic, devils with arses for heads.

In the one cabinet you will find a fish with ears, wings and claws and a squirrel-snake-bird. The artificial grotesque. Nature's grotesquery surpasses this: a cat foetus with two faces, a pre-puppy with an extra eye on top of its head. Not artificial, not art, not artistic. An abhorrent formaldehyde suspension testifying to the ability of nature to outstrip anything which our limited imaginations can produce. We can sew the bits together, but only in a studied, creative way which is devoid of the revulsion triggered by accidents. In 4P human ingenuity, including my fantasies, fails. And the bird shit wins.