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4 February
It couldn't just have been hearing Mary Ann Kennedy to-night presenting a largely live show, the last of those that have been on during the week, from events at Celtic Connections (in Glasgow), but I was reminded a little while back of the name Shona Spurtle.
Now, I knew perfectly well what the name meant (to me) - and I will wager that it doesn't mean a whole lot to many others - but I didn't know if it was spelt Spirtle (as I don't remember paying any attention to when I could have seen it written). So, rather than putting into my search-box the name of where Shona comes from, I put in that spelling - setting a challenge.
Obscure though it is - but I might, although I doubt it, find a plethora of fan web-sites in my search-results - Google® knew what I meant, and has taken me straight there:
I now know that there is a clip on YouTube, and that someone liked the name enough to have it as a user-name to comment on a story connected with the Scottish Parliament.
Amazon®, ever ready to please, even claims to have a web-page called www.amazon.co.uk/spurtle, which won't be the laugh that I hope for it to be, as I think that I have clicked such advertising links before...
No, it turns out that I am wrong, for, although it looked like a page of ball-point pens, it is some sort of culinary stick - it could be a magic-wand, for all that I know! - in connection with porridge (the making of, I have to think, as I have no conception how (or why) one could eat that dish with something looking like this).
In any case, they go for nearly £5.00 (well, more than that with postage - is there a standard Amazon® charge for a spurtle?), the best ones boast of being made of beech* (how that can matter to anything?), and you can even buy a box of six. Plus there's a hardback book, but it's miserably not available, called Mrs Spurtle goes South, which, I think, precedes this other appearance as a name.
Bizarrely, there is even a double of the Wikipedia® web-page for the vehicle in which our Mrs (or Ms) Spurtle appeared. It is called Wikipeetia, and it claims to exist solely because 'you spelled someting wrong'**, so:
For your amusement, we've also included a copy of the entire Wikipedia article misspelled
Helpfully, as I am obviously a remedial case for making such an error (?), there is a link that will take me where I can learn to spell English, or just to the unprocessed Wikipedia® piece.
As yet, though, nothing to lure me to buy a recording that shows Siobhan Redmond's exploits as Shona, but she may have gone on to use that 'handle' on Arsebook® and Twitter®, both of which claim that Shona has a presence.
No, again I speak too soon (what a rich vein this is: or is that the - I kid you not! - Glayva talking?), because I can buy a pirate DVD, and there is a web-site with a quotation (and they don't even know where it's from!), which I shall use by way of an ending of all this - for want of a better word - craic:
You are a waster, Sebastian! You are a lying cheat! You are a fibster, a fabulist, an equivocating shim-shammer, a cousining cardsharp, a pathological mythomaniac, a yarner, a palterer who perjures, a whited sepulchre, a cantering serpent, a rat!
Yes, she likes him!
End-notes
* Then again, it is traditional for wash-backs to be made from pine, and not just any old pine, but Oregon pine. We are talking of - if you know what I'm talking about - a very conservative means of producing a drinkable spirit, where they reproduce the dents in the copper-stills, when they have worn so thin that they need repair.
That said, some have taken the view that this Oregon pine approach adds nothing to the all-important taste (too much liquid in there for too short a time to make a difference - except, perhaps, at the leve of homoeopathy), and have gone for stainless-steel vessels. Which you would have no way of knowing when you buy the product, unless you have visited.)
** This seems a tenuous reason to have gone to the trouble of having such a dual text (even if, in it, for example,the word not is turned into 'nto', in a restless attempt to misspell everything, whereas what is really presented is often enough just a meaningless rearrangement of the letters).
I cannot believe that the reason applies in all cases, since this is not the only time that I have looked at what is just the fourth page of search-results, and I do not reall seeing such a thing, although I am often enough searching for a name precisely because I do not know how it is spelt. However, I shall attempt to find the famous Helen Mirran... Well, it didn't surface in the first hundred search-results, but I now know that 66-year-old Mirren, the famous typing error, has - seemingly by her much-vaunted posing nude - earnt the title of having 'the sexiest body on [the] planet' (according to www.salon.com), and also wants not only to appear in Doctor Who, but to be the first female Doctor***.
*** Doubtless her part-time role appreciating art for MOMA (the Museuem of Modern Art in New York) fits her for such a role (I cannot wait for the first Cubist Doctor Who). In the commentary on a clip that she filmed for the museum, which I might have to resist watching (after such a write-up), we are told:
Truth be told, I’m a huge fan of the dame. In addition to being a fantastic actor, she’s beautiful, smart, and completely unpretentious. She’s an art lover, and she is especially enamored of the pioneering abstract paintings of Vasily Kandinsky, whose work is represented in MoMA’s collection and whose “Four Seasons” were very fortuitously on view on the day of her visit. [...]
Like these amazing works, Helen does not disappoint, and in this interview she talks passionately about her great love of painting—particularly her “lovely friends” the Kandinsky paintings—and about the connections between painting and her work.
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