For over four centuries, Old Key’s Almanacke has proved a spookily unerring guide to the coming twelvemonth. This year, the mysterious figure in the black cape who, it is said, communes with Old Key himself, has granted The Dabbler exclusive permission to publish these oh-so-cogent utterances.
In the year of Our Lord MMXI…
January : “Cones” appear at the site of a road closure.
February : Scientists discover a new anagram of Pol Pot.
March : A scribbler publishes a fatuity in The Guardian.
April : Down at the docks, noisome ooze and bilgewater.
May : The De Botton Conundrum is solved, to universal rejoicing.
June : In a hotel, a doctor demands his sausages.
July : Vince Cable stands windswept upon Westminster Bridge.
August : The mighty look on the works of Ozymandias and despair!
September : The crystal ball is cloudy, but we descry something about a footballer and his hamstring.
October : Eggs hatch on a farm.
November : The iFry is launched, a simulacrum of Stephen Fry that witters incessantly and is small enough to be placed in a wastepaper basket.
December : Jesus Christ returns, his image appearing on a slice of toast.
also in March – Slamblogging takes off in a big way
The absence of any reference in July to the public hanging and quartering of shagaSwede Julian in Boras market square is puzzling, does old Alma Key know sumfink that we don’t.
Also in February, Brit treats us to clips from long-forgotten rock bands and tells us we should take them very seriously because they don’t.
unlooking services and listening clouds also become possible sometime in the summer, round about the same time that cravats go supernova
“June : In a [British not Spanish] hotel, a doctor demands his sausages.”
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“June
“By June, finally, after months of darkness and reversals of temperature, one can dare to live in hope that this country is not the land of perpetual gloom, ugliness and fear. By the middle of the month, one might have had five days of meaningfully warm and clear weather, and stepped out without any socks on. Suddenly, all kinds of emotions that we’d resigned ourselves to no longer seem to fit quite so well: being sad, for a start, but also living huddled in layers of clothes, shutting yourself off from nature, longing to live in Alicante. The weather gives us something to emulate. To think of going abroad now would be insanity. It’s a dereliction of duty to leave. Stay and dare, for once, to be happy in Britain.
“Alain de Botton”
From “What the months of the year mean to me”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/17/2011-calendar-what-months-mean
So these ”cones” are not as we know them? And the Christ; what is toast if not burnt bread?
[...] number of errors and infelicities crept in to our summary last week of prognostications from Old Key’s Almanacke for 2011. This was due to some interference in the mystic communiqué channels, probably the wrong sort of [...]