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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
** THE ONLY BOOK MORE RIDICULOUS THAN 2020 ** 'It's BUCKETLICIOUS! I command you to enjoy this book' Lord Buckethead The Battle of Hastings, where Harold's penchant for wearing on his head an upturned bucket rather than the standard issue helmet was to prove his undoing; the invention of the wheel, which occurred when a gentleman in Mesopotamia stumbled upon a bucket and watched transfixed as it rolled across the floor; the foundation of Rome: Romulus, Remus and a bucket - the rest is history. Unchanged in design over millennia, the humble bucket possesses a versatility unmatched in the history of human invention. It is the unobtrusive onlooker, the fly on the wall sat in quiet contemplation at all great turning points in world history. Detailing 50 buckets that were present at great moments in history, Guardian travel writer and author of Tiny Castles and Tiny Histories, Dixe Wills, describes each event through their sage and unblinking gaze. It's time to start ticking some buckets off your list.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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To the Mayflower crew, without whom this book would probably still have been written.
Introduction
Unassuming, perennially overlooked and yet nigh on universal, the bucket is the ultimate unobtrusive onlooker, the fly on the wall sat in quiet contemplation at all the great turning points in world history. Blessed with a design of such simplicity and brilliance that it has remained unchanged over the millennia, the humble bucket possesses a versatility unmatched in the history of human invention. Fill it with sand and you’ve got a fire extinguisher – perfect for putting out fires of any size up to and including small candles. Fill it with ice and you’ve got a charity challenge spread by social media. Fill it with water and you’ve got yourself a bucket of water.
Not to be confused with its exotic coal-portering cousin the scuttle, the bucket is happy in all its known states: empty, not quite empty, encrusted with a lining of concrete, upside down, ‘partially filled with radiation from one of daddy’s experiments which is why, children, you must never touch the cat again’ and verminous. And hey, unlike a sandwich, you can fill a bucket with an infinite amount of anti-matter and you’ve got the makings of your very own portable black hole, complete with its own event horizon, Schwarzschild Radius and handle.
It’s now widely accepted that in the Middle Ages as much as 90% of all matter not classified as ‘general filth and disease’ was rags. What’s less well known is that the viiiother 10% was bucket. Though it’s obviously upsetting that the canny little vessel now plays a less prominent rôle in daily life, popular culture still teems with references to buckets and pails. Jack and Jill (p29) famously made an incident-packed assault on a hill to fetch one; while the difficulties attendant in using straw to mend a hole in a bucket are discussed at some length by a punishingly dreary couple named Liza and Henry.
Popular bucket-centred phrases include President Truman’s famous dictum ‘the bucket stops here’; the ubiquitous business cliché ‘there’s no ‘I’ in bucket’; and the meteorologist’s favourite ‘it’s bucketing down’, an expression that saw its genesis after the Great Bucket Storm of 1731 in which Hemel Hempstead was almost entirely destroyed by a freak storm of buckets. Visit the town today and you’ll see why God chose to smite it.
But perhaps the best-known idiom of all is ‘to kick the bucket’, a somewhat louche summation of the snuffing out of a fellow human being’s life. It’s commonly believed that its origins stem from hangings in which the unfortunate subject falls from or is pushed off a bucket. However, this is all tosh and should be expunged from your mind, leaving room for other things like the details of the collapse of the Ottoman–Turk Empire.
The most likely explanation is that the saying derives not from the modern bucket as we know it but from the days when the term was used to define a yoke or beam (as is still the case in Norfolk, the land that time forgot). In the process of being slaughtered, pigs were customarily suspended on such yokes and, in their last desperate ixstruggle for the life cruelly being taken from them by a so-called higher species, were apt to ‘kick the bucket’.
Out of this phrase crawled ‘the bucket list’, an inventory of activities curated by folk who fear that there will come a day when they cease to exist. Death is, as we know, nothing more than fake news put about by the lame-stream media as part of an eco-fascist scam run by George Soros from a secret lair deep inside the Hoover Dam. However, for those who let themselves be taken in by the lie, the prospect of not being around any more provokes a perfectly natural urge to bungee-jump off the roof of the Sistine Chapel and dash headlong into the Caspian Sea to go swimming with artichokes. It’s the ultimate in FOMO.
This is all well and good but, as we all know, when it comes to the ultimate in fulfilling life experiences, you really can’t beat a good viewing of a bucket. In this assertion I am backed by philosopher, polymath and scourge of the milquetoast Thomas Hobbes who sunnily observed that life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, so you may as well pack in as many buckets as you can before it’s over’.
To that end, for the first time since the Ancient Babylonian scroll of Interesting Pails That May Not Be Available In The Afterlife, this book corrals details of the planet’s 50 best buckets to view, see and otherwise run an appreciative eye over. From the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People Kelp Water-Carrying Bucket to Hedy Lamarr’s Bucket of Spread Spectrum Frequency Hopping Bits (and Bobs), all history’s top buckets are here, along with a selection of surprisingly xcompelling contemporary buckets specially chosen for the connoisseur who prides themself on keeping abreast of the hot new models in the never-less-than-exhilarating world of buckets.
Each entry comes with useful information on where to go to see the bucket in question. And last but not least (in fact, at the front), there’s a handy list of the 50 buckets to tick off until you’ve got the set and can die as peaceably as nature allows.
Happy Bucketing, one and all!
And don’t forget – if you die before seeing all 50 you’ve totally failed at life.
* * *
For those readers who find the concept of kicking the bucket too distasteful, there’s my companion volume Shuffling Off – 50 Mortal Coils You Must See Before You Conk Out. xi
The Ultimate Tickable Bucket List
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Cleopatra’s Bucket
Much tosh has been written about the meeting of Cleopatra and Mark Antony in Tarsus in 41 BC. However, insiders know that once they’d had a chat about the spelling of Antony’s name and what had happened to the h and all that (he didn’t know – it had always ‘just not been there’), they found they didn’t have much to say. Also, Latin was an Indo-European tongue while Egyptian was Afro-Asiatic and there was not a lot of common ground, to be honest.
Inevitably, the conversation turned to buckets.
‘Nice bucket you’ve got there,’ Antony ventured. This date hadn’t gone as he’d hoped. Bucket-chat was very much Plan C territory. To aid comprehension, he pointed at the bucket and smiled. 4
‘Thank you,’ Cleopatra replied. ‘It’s for transporting the asses’ milk to my bath from … well, from that container over there.’
She mimed a servant dipping the bucket into that container over there and transporting the milk to her bath. She cringed. Why were they even in her bathroom? She couldn’t for the life of her work out how that had happened and she began to wonder if there hadn’t been a misunderstanding. Well he needn’t think he was going to go in here. Roman general or no, he could use the communal palace toilets like everyone else.
‘Fascinating,’ said Mark Antony, unfascinated. This was all going terribly. Here he was, a third of the triumvirate. What did that make him? A triumvirile? A triumph? A trumpet? Anyway, pretty much the most powerful man in the Roman Empire meeting the woman who could fund a whole military expedition if he fancied having a crack at the Parthian Empire, which he very much did, yes please thankyouyesindeedyesyes. And yet they were pointing at a bucket – o me miserum.
‘What?’ asked Cleopatra. But she was already thinking longingly of an asp.
SEE IT:Great Mimes Through Time, Tarsus Museum, Turkey.
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Moon-Landing Rock Sample Bucket
Everyone knows Neil Armstrong’s famous first line on taking his one small step for him upon the surface of the Moon. (Why such a small step, Neil? You weigh almost nothing suddenly – have a good old stride.) The second line, uttered by Buzz Aldrin, was less memorable but all the more gladdening for being unscripted.
‘Have you got the rock sample bucket, Neil?’ he buzzed, for they were on first-name terms.
‘Bother!’ quoth Neil, somewhat more vexed than his exclamation might imply but aware that his words were still being broadcast to untold millions below. ‘Could you get it from the space cupboard, Buzz?’ 6
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