Let’s have “mysophilia”

Malcolm’s authority for such things is, as always, the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED does not recognise “mysophilia”, but happily gives us:

mysophobia, n. Psychol. Irrational fear of dirt or defilement.

Cinders

He first encountered the term some three years ago in the BBC website’s saga of Cinders. This comes with a brief, but uplifting video-clip  of the star of today’s show. So, on with the motley:

A piglet scared of wallowing in mud has overcome its fears with the help of some Wellington boots.

Six-week-old Cinders appears to suffer from mysophobia, a fear of dirt, after refusing to join her siblings as they splashed around in the mud.

Owner Andrew Keeble from Thirsk, North Yorks, said his daughter Ellie, 12, suggested kitting her out in the tiny footwear which had been on a key ring.

“Lo and behold they fitted her like a glove,” Mr Keeble said.

“She’s scared of mud, but her brothers and sisters are quite happy in it.

“We’ve never come across this before. They are born ready to go and explore, but she never really liked going in the mud.”

Anyone heading for the Keeble farm at Thirsk would have a further trek across about ten miles of North Yorkshire to reach Bedale.

That BBC piece is a mini-epic, with a classic structure worthy of any well-plotted novel. After that up-beat intro, establishing character, we get the central crisis with its requisite frisson of fear:

Mr Keeble and wife Debbie, both 42, run a sausage company and keep about 200 pigs on their 1,000-acre farm.

Only then are we re-assured with the fade-out into the porcine silhouette in the sunset:

But the father-of-four said there was no chance that Cinders would be slaughtered.

“She’s more of a pet really now and she’s going to live a very long and happy life,” he said.

Ah, bless! Hold the apple sauce.

Cinders came back to Malcolm’s mind when Victoria Gill, Science and nature reporter, BBC News, posted this scientific break-through:

It is a true picture of contentment, and now a scientist is suggesting that a pig’s love of mud is more than just a way to keep cool.

A researcher in the Netherlands has looked at wallowing behaviour in pigs’ wild relatives to find out more about what motivates the animals to luxuriate in sludge.

His conclusions suggest that wallowing is vital for the animals’ well-being.

The study is published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

Marc Bracke from Wageningen University and Research Centre is propounding that pigs don’t wallow because they lack sweat-glands: on the contrary, they failed to develop sweat-glands because they do wallow.

Hence Malcolm’s suggestion that the scientific lexicon needs the term mysophilia. And, by next week, in the more sordid recesses of the internet, it may well have become a fully-fledged and recognised fetish.

Unreality strikes

What with neo-hagiolotry and not-quite-state weddings, it’s been a hard few days for Malcolm and his kind.

As to that matching of princeling with mere millionaires’ commoner sprog, there are two articles which got much of it aright:

• Gary Younge for The Nation:

I’m not precious. I don’t let my politics get in the way of my trash interest. But what Americans consume as a celebrity wedding is something far more insidious: it is an affair of state.

It’s been almost 250 years since Americans last had to debate the question of the monarchy seriously, so it should be no surprise that some would be a little rusty. Here’s a refresher. Having a royal family establishes inherited privilege at the heart of your system of government and embeds patronage at the center of your politics. Our upper chamber is still the House of Lords. People pay taxes to “Her Majesty’s Revenue”; if you win an election, you become “Her Majesty’s Government”; if you go to court, you face not the “people” but the Crown. All of this is of course primarily symbolic. The trouble is, it’s symbolic of something quite terrible—the notion that our head of state gains the position not by merit or election but by birth. In Britain, no matter how aspirant a parent is, nobody buys their kid a T-shirt that boasts Next King of England because the job is never up for grabs.

Yeah, spot on. And then:

• A truly brilliant essay by Nick Cohen for today’s Observer. It begins:

Trying to find an institution absurd enough to represent the false promises of true love and girlish happiness which American society dangled before the young women of the 1920s, Dorothy Parker hit on a Ruritanian monarchy.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.

As if to distract us from the thought that Kate Middleton will discover that love is a thing that can always go wrong in the House of Windsor, Buckingham Palace added a Balkan touch to its “fairy-tale wedding”. A man it called “King Constantine of the Hellenes” was in Westminster Abbey. “Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia” and one “King Simeon II of Bulgaria” were included on the guest list, too. And, as if to make Dorothy Parker’s point for her, they were joined by “King Michael I of Romania”.

But while there was a Marie of Romania – queen from 1914 to 1927 – there is no King Michael I. Greece, Bulgaria and Romania all deposed their monarchies, and even after the brutal experience of fascism and communism, no one could persuade their citizens to take them back. Meanwhile, the Palace’s “Alexander of Yugoslavia” not only has no throne, but also claims the title of a country that no longer exists except on old maps of cold war Europe.

Then Cohen continues to kick blue blood out of shins for another dozen paragraphs.

There was another anecdote about a royal occasion and Alexander not of un-Yugoslavia. While Malcolm cannot be bothered to source it, it involved David Blunkett, as a democratically-elected MP, senior member of a democratic Cabinet and Home Secrtetary, being displaced from a state occasion to provide space for said Александар Карађорђевић. When the Home Office pointed out that both the claim to a non-throne and the nationality were specious, the Palace was still obdurate.

And anyone who had the stamina to plod trough the pages of pabulum et circenses in Friday’s Times, eventually came to this gem:

So Malcolm, not by royal command nor Papal diktat, groans and, reasonably by forcefully, opens another bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, originating from the República de Chile (as top).

Titter ye not!

The simple pleasures of Malcolm’s declining years include a mental list of inappropriate names.

There really was a pupil named “Wayne Kerr”, on the school roll about the same time as Tracy Lacey.

But it’s the international scene that produces the real challenges to keeping a straight face.

• Who could forget Bugarov, the Bulgarian minister whom the BBC insisted on pronouncing Boo-gar-uf?
• The Archbishop of manila, Cardinal Sin?
• The 74th Prime Minister of Japan, who frequently graced the pages of Private Eye, Noborau Takashita?
• The captain of Russia and star of the Emirates Stadium, Andrei Sergeyevich Arshavin?
• All those Burmese gents, the most printable of whom is Colonel U Ba Shin?
• Even the speculation on the origin of the surname “Shakespeare“?

To whom must now be added, thanks to page 17 of today’s Sunday Times:

Anurag Dikshit, co-founder of the online gambling site Partygaming.

Anyway, let’s cheerfully dredge the depths: