I am the walrus*

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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16 March

Ringo, if anyone, looked more and more like a walrus at one point (some, maybe cruelly, would say that such a beast could have better performed his role in the band, whereas modern science has proved that the walrus has a near-congenital (?) tone-deafness, unsuited to a drummer).

On the celebrated cover of the Sergeant Pepper album**, we think that we see Ringo, standing as one of the group at the front. However, microscopic analysis of the cardboard (and also of some DNA from Orson Welles that was knocking around the lab) shows that he is really beneath the surface, having been pulverized to a few microns thick in a freak fishing accident***.

John, not wishing to be outdone, sewed himself into the lining of one of Marilyn's gowns (allegedy, the pinkish one from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), and refused to come out until Paul admitted that, as had been shown by the famous backwards playing of Pepper, he was actually dead.

He then buried Paul in a box of England's Glory, empty except for two used matches and an excessively large piece of cotton-wool, which he liked to squeeze inside, despite the box's protests (the arse**** even went to the House of Lords).

George wasn't interested much in any of this, and slipped off to play squash (in the nude?).


End-notes

* It is now postulated that, on account of the fact that George Martin misheard, taking the uninflected neutral vowel-sound (which peppers spoken English) in the indefinite article (sc. the word 'a') and thinking that it was in the definite article (to wit the word 'the'), and then promulgated this error in the written material for the album (which the boys weren't much bothered about), what should have been understood, more meaningfully, was that the notional singer of the song is saying I am a walrus, which is no longer counterfactual.

** According to Andrew Graham Dixon's latest art-historical study, The Vanishing Socks (London, 2011), it is the unacknowledged work of Pablo Picasso (under the influence of Frida Kahlo, who had just been floating past) .

*** Sadly, as is all too often the case with this sort of fishing exploit, no freaks were caught either.

**** Some assert that this should be emended to read 'case', but a matchbox is clearly no sort of case, so that just doesn't 'make the grade' as a theory.


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