Much as I scorn the News, every so often an item pops up that spurs my interest, though probably not for the reasons intended. For example, this week, as I was assimilating facts about the wine harvest in South Africa (smitten by a long-term drought, in case you’re interested), my ears pricked up at the news that Theresa May had written to Vladimir Putin, offering her condolences over the shopping centre fire in Kemerovo.
As bland and inconsequential a news item as you could ever dream up – possibly more dull even than the controversial journalist Claud Cockburn’s legendary ‘Small earthquake in Chile – Not many dead’, with which he won an informal competition in the 1920s among the Times’ sub-editors to see who could write the most boring headline – yet three things struck me about this colourless snippet, the first of which was that she had chosen to write rather than phone or use social media (though you’ll be relieved to know it was republished on the British Embassy’s Facebook page). Don’t statespeople usually pick up the phone in these circumstances? I began to imagine how the conversation might have gone.
“Hello Vlad.”
“Hello Terry. Is it about ze nerve agent again?”
“Ahaha, no, Vlad, not on this occasion…”
“Oh, you vant Vorld Cup ticketz.”
“No, silly…”
I presume she calls him Vlad behind closed doors, although, given the historical associations with the name, perhaps tact forbids. I’m referring, of course, to Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian tyrant whose infamy gave rise to the legend of Count Dracula. It’s not a great job title, is it? Impaler. Imagine finding yourself making small talk with him at a party, as he gleefully skewers two cocktail sausages on one stick.
“So, what do you do?”
“I’m an impaler.”
“I’ve never heard of one of those. Are you sure you don’t mean impala?”
“What, the medium-sized antelope native to eastern and southern Africa? Don’t be silly. Who’d do that for a living? No, I’m an impaler. Mind you, I wouldn’t mind a pair of those horns.”
Vlad the Impaler earned his sobriquet, history tells us, by having his enemies impaled on pointed wooden stakes. But knowing how history has a habit of rewriting the truth, we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that he was just an ordinary bloke who liked building fences round things.
I’ll explain.
The ‘pale’ that gives us the word impale is a pointed wooden stake, from the Latin palus, and before the invention of barbed wire, people in the security business would fix a load of these stakes together to form a pointy fence, which we know today as a paling or palisade, but was referred to back in Dracula’s day simply as a pale, much as a collection of fish is known as fish.
In Ireland, there was an extensive pale which sectioned off the proportion of the country under direct English rule and kept out marauders, rather like the Great Wall of China only on a smaller scale. You might say it was a pale imitation. The whole area became known as the Pale, and it’s from this that we get the expression ‘beyond the pale’. It’s not, as you might have thought, a shade of Max Factor face cream for Goths.
So the verb ‘to impale’ can also mean to enclose within a fence, as well as to skewer on a wooden stake. But if you were a news editor, which would you run with? Skewering sells. Fence building? Not so much.
So that was the second thing that preoccupied me in relation to Aunt Theresa offering her condolences amid the war of words and expulsions. The third was how daft politics is, when one minute they’re chastising one another for wanton acts of treachery and the next they’re sending sympathy cards and chatting cordially over the cocktail sausages. What are we to believe?
Cockburn was fond of the saying “Believe nothing until it has been officially denied”. He might as well have left it at “Believe nothing”. Both Terry and Vlad are looking a little wan these days. And as every Clint Eastwood fan knows, Death rides a pale horse (from the Latin pallidus).
