Luton Celebrities

So many living celebrities are associated with Luton that it would be dangerous to single out any for mention and so risk offence, wholly unintended, to those whom space prevents me from including. However, as my late husband once said to me, in one of his rare moments of civility: ‘a writer who offends nobody has nothing to say’.

So I would do an injustice to my reader did I not give a brief biography of the following seminal geniuses who (I am reliably assured) are spoken of with affection in every Luton tavern, sewing circle and ordinary.

Pablo Castenada. Born 1997, this precocious artiste is said to be responsible for Luton’s unique ‘chronoclasmic’ calendar. Annoyed by the prosaic division of time into days and hours, uncongenial to his artistic temperment, he created in 1993 an entirely poetic chronology in which every day is a long weekend, every moment is a Happy Hour and time is reversible so that selected Happy Hours may be revisited at will.

After successful trials at the University of Bedfordshire, the system has now been adopted by the county’s road, rail and air services.

Visitors are therefore strongly advised to purchase a Castenometer and syringe at the tollgates upon entering the county. The hour and day indicators of the Castenometer are powered by the random movements, within the device, of a small weevil. If time appears to slow, stop or move backwards, the weevil can be revived with a drop of sugar water using the syringe.

Every ward of Luton now delightfully has its own ‘time’ zone. When crossing into a new zone, it is very advisable to establish the current time peculiar to that ward by asking one of the ever helpful policemen (‘bobbies’) for the ‘time o’day’. For two dandiprats, he will give you - subject to the byelaws of the moment - whatever time you wish.

Jesus Crispo (1972-). Luton’s foremost landscape artist rose to fame - and well deserved it was! - when he devised a new method of rearranging the landscape. His inspiration came to him when, flying across the town in a Montgolfier balloon, he noted that the procession of carriages, barouches and cabriolets below him on the southern bypass formed a glittering ever-changing multicoloured necklace. But it was too beautiful to be termed art.

So the very next day he arranged for Boy Scouts to hold diversion signs early in the morning at the junctions of every road that entered Luton. The lads had been instructed to divert carriages into preassigned directions according to their colours!

As everyone now knows, the result was the stunning coup de peinture that still hangs in the Town Hall. All the commuters’ carriages can be seen artistically rearranged across the town by colour in a giant grid-locked pattern that took a week to untangle and that spells ‘CRISPO!’. The artist photographed it at an altitude of 2000 feet from the Montgolfier balloon where he now lives.

Philippa Firk, PhD (1930-2001), began her career as a social engineer but she went on to found the now highly esteemed science of Ludology. Her simple idea transformed Luton into the adventure centre of Europe!

It’s now common knowledge that the breakthrough occurred to her in 1951 when she was fined two dandiprats for wearing clothes at Luton’s nudist Lido beach. She was then fined three dandiprats for not wearing clothes when she placed one foot on the public pavement adjacent to the beach to purchase a goat curry pastie.

She indignantly concluded that the official games were not very good so she set to work to improve them, by turning Luton into a game-player’s paradise. The splendid result is that any stranger whom you chance upon in the borough is, very probably, not what they seem!

That blind disgusting beggar who whines at you from a dark alley ‘alms for a poor awd sapper?’ might equally be Tom Cruise doing religious penance or the Speaker of the House on gardening leave. Do not be deceived.

If a guest at your tavern breakfast table should suddenly clutch his/her heart, gasp and fall over as if dead, do not be fooled. He/she is probably soliciting from you the kiss of life. Cry ‘naughty basket!’ and s/he will at once get up with a shameless smile.

That ugly gap-toothed witch who stops your horse most rudely in the town square by waving Dragon’s Blood (oil of rosewood from the Carib islands) under its nose may actually not be, as she claims, a hisan sazar or Arabic horse sorcerer. She might well be Luton’s new upstart carpet bagging Member of Parliament, a woman long notorious for her wiles! And so it goes.

Remember the maxim: nothing in Luton is what it seems.

You can trust only the friendly police officers (‘bobbies’). They may wear any disguise but they can always be recognised by their Gay Pride badges plus unnaturally padded jackets which denote body armour.

Upon entering Luton, the tolbooth keeper may ask you to state the role you intend to perform in town. Do note: the occupations of thief, bawd, student, addict and murderer are already well spoken for in Luton, and often in the same person. Be creative! But always lie.

For a prospectus on BA and postgraduate degree courses in Ludology studies, call the University of Bedfordshire: xxx.

Aldus Malkin (1947-2008) founded the great publishing company Village Guild, now second in eminence only to the legendary house of McGuffin. Malkin had noted that literary agents and publishers were laughably unprofessional in the way that they judged a book to be suitable for publication.

In a famous prank, Malkin submitted to 50 agents the disguised opening pages of several best-selling novels, using anonymous names. All agents turned down these submissions, sometimes with snide comments that urged their authors to study a book on creative writing.

Malkin correctly concluded that agents do not read the works submitted to them. Their office clerk does. Six months after receiving each package, s/he will briefly scan the first paragraph before concluding it is not Naomi Campbell and is therefore unpublishable. Only rarely will s/he return the submission as s/he has already soaked the postage stamps off the return envelope and lost the covering letter.

In a stroke of perceptive genius, Malkin refined this amusing lottery into a rigorous science. All reputable agents and publishers now use Malkin’s Calculus to judge the value of unsolicited manuscripts. They place every package in the Malkin Midden. a great cage turned by a water mill. (Publishing companies have always been sited by rivers so that royalty cheques can be the more easily dispatched to authors by slow-moving barges.)

Of course, most packages burst in the cage and these are recycled for their postage stamps and blank reverse sheets, which make useful scratch pads. Any surviving packages are picked out of the cage with tongs by a blindfolded pizza delivery boy, then tossed out of the office window.

If any package is returned by an honest passerby, it is deemed to be divine providence. That manuscript is published without further inspection and is afforded the company’s full publicity budget.

Invariably, it wins awards and sells millions.

I am proud to say that my own publisher, Village Guild Publications, was among the first to adopt Malkin’s precision approach to literary assessment. As a result, my own modest work Secret Luton was brought before the public eye, certainly by divine providence, and the rest is history.