Prom 39: Caution, likely to offend

Well, my post called Prom 39. You were there when I last looked, at 6pm, indexed by Google.

But, by 9am next morning, you were GONE. All trace of you DISAPPEARED. A blank space where your wrods should be.

Woah. Sinister and SPOOKY.

Dig says he is not surprised. He says there exist mystical fingers who roam our ethers looking for copy knockers that upset, distress, cause reputational damage, harm, disfigurement, offence, indeed any and all general objection when connected with brands, names and identities. Once found, the magic fingers whisk away, by deniable means, all knocker copy quicker than you can say Jack Robinson. (Due apologies to Jack Robinson.)

I'm inclined to think it's true. The reason my post Prom 39 disappeared last night is because the Virgin Mary has reputational brand management consultants working for her right now. They have pilfered my post.

I should be outraged. But instead, in this intriging story of a disappearing text, maybe whisked away by the wrod police, I feel only a perverse pride. My copy, censored! AT LAST. Kicked out of advertising, failed at teaching, now having the wrods of Prom 39 ripped from me by the Good Forces of Virgin Mary patrolling Planet Internet.

I appeal only to Borges. Prom 39 is out there somewhere, roaming the universe, the wrods wrapping round us in infinite conjugations and reproductions, the whole made significant by absence.

Hey, it's a nice idea.

But in the past I have got away with a few Gods Blimeys, Aunt Fannies and Bottoms. And then I found it. So it's here, put back, below. (But don't say you weren't warned.)

Prom 39

Never mind about the children, I am learning stuff at the proms. Spending hours in the company of classical music scholars is rubbing off on me. You watch. Soon I will be all name dropping Boulez and making references to deep glowing throat and bass eruption.

In ordinary contexts, utterances like this would suggest porn, straight and simple, but not here in the refined world of the Royal Albert Hall.

Here a person can come out with a statement like the Virgin Mary has far too much vibrato in her and no-one titters. (Except me.)

But this is what I love about these music lovers, locked down here in the Arena of the Royal Albert Hall. They are so totally focused on the twitch of Thierry Fischer's wrist muscles, the left vocal chord of Toby Spence, and the exact pitch on the third note coming after the split wind, that they are blind to just about anything else in life.

Yet these same charming and gentle people who transport themselves to spiritual ethers on the floating backs of chords, and who probably emerge from the Albert Hall with extreme hair, blinking bewildered like moles, overwhelmed at the ordinary human world composed of streets and traffic lights, they are given to some of the most vicious and angry verbal attacks known to humanity.

I had to literally shield the ears of Tiger, Squirrel and Shark after one gentleman began to complain about where Fischer had put the brass. To provoke such intensity of outrage, you'd have thought the conductor blew up this poor listener's house, shot his grandmother, drank his claret, and chewed on the bones of his dead cat.

But see, I learn that stuff like this matters.

So here's the other thing I love about these classy music people. Their fantastic game of superior oneupmanship. Their technique is to be both simultaneously excruciatingly polite while delivering visceral put-downs. Their goal is to deliver a put-down so stupendously judgemental that the listener simply cannot better it, but remains only frothing in incoherent anger.

And all over whether the virgin came late after the second entry.