They're on kid's telly now.

There is a kids television show here in the UK called Big Cook Little Cook. I’m not sure if it’s still shown, most things are to fill up our multi-channel world so it probably is. The interesting thing about it is that both the protagonists (or “cooks” as the show would have it) wear rather attractive cardigans. They get mixed up in cookery related shenanigans mediated through cheap CGI, little kids will be thrilled, or perhaps as bored as I was.

The cardigans are however pretty good, though much of the time obscured by aprons (boo hiss) and the two blokes who wear them are reasonably easy on the eye. I wonder where those cards are now? Stuck in some costume repository doing no good at all I would imagine. Sad loss. Still, you can catch them on youtube  in perpetuity probably.

Here’s a couple of screen-grabs including what I believe would be called a facial if it were gentleman’s relish, most likely pudding batter.

                                                                     Christmas Card

                                                                              Facial

The Cardigan Riots

Great moments in Cardigan History

Back in 1964, the era of the mods and rockers, many men wore cardigans. They were fashionable though still, perhaps, considered a little wimpish. They were often hand knitted by mothers and grandmothers.

For anyone who liked them, cardigans were as attractive then as they are now. What they had then that they don’t have now is a following. Men who were inclined to wear them stuck together and identified. To apply the taxonomy outlined above, they were unlikely to be rockers. Though even at the time, when society was in denial about homosexuality it was understood that a gay man could belong to that particular group (cf The Leather Boys, book and film from 1964, a title which at the time was not freighted with the meaning it has now). In short, cardigans were most likely to be worn by mods.

Mods and rockers did not get on. There were skirmishes, often at seaside resorts where the two groups came into conflict at weekends and on bank holidays. These conflicts formed the basis of the big moral panic of the day and were a topic upon which the paid gobs of that time pontificated ad nauseam. Contrary to their predictions the world did not come to an end, although their world did. These days we are a lot better informed and alert to the crap that the likes of  Lord Boothby and Malcolm Muggeridge poured forth. They were hypocrites and quite frankly cunts.

Anyway, my point is about the picture I’ve posted here. I fancy that it was taken during the Great Cardigan Riot of 1964 on Brighton seafront. The cardigan wearers were demanding a change in the law to permit the wearing of cardigans during acts of homosexual congress. This was illegal at the time and many men were in prison as a result. It was believed back then that incarcerating gay men in large, thinly supervised, single sex institutions would go some way to rehabilitating them.

[The information in this piece was drawn from the Quarterly Journal of Idle Speculation and is unlikely to be true. Except for the paid gobs bit, those people really were appalling.]

It's been a long time. I've moved house, I no longer live in the Great Wen. Home will still be referred to as cardigan towers but there'll be a lot more room.

Having all this space has led me to ponder on the nature of space and seeing a story in the papers today about the discovery of gravitational waves led me to reading about the big rip. The big rip is a theory about the end of the universe that will come about in about 22 billion years if certain assumptions are met. All a bit cosmological but anyway, matter falls apart so my cardigans won't need washing any more. The involvement of cardigans in this cataclysm doesn't end there. The illustration below indicates what will happen in the run up to the big rip.

Now it may just be me, almost certainly is, but that image looks decidedly like a cardigan. If I were a "spiritual" person or given to being messianic I'd be writing a couple of paragraphs of bollox about this. As it happens I'm not.