You know when you sleep, I think that you look like you're dead?

Tonight spatch and I had to hit pause on our movie and laugh so hard that the Roku remote—whose microphone we had duct-taped over to keep it from hearing us—thought we were trying to give it instructions because we were watching Carry On Screaming! (1966) and the electrically regenerated mad scientist played by Kenneth Williams had just enunciated the name of the mummified pharaoh in his luridly purple-lit drawing room, "the founder of the Fourth Dynasty, you know—King Rubatiti." We missed half the scene that followed. It wasn't even the caliber of the double-entendre. It's not a bad one, even by the similarly outrageous standards of Mel Brooks or Monty Python, but I'm pretty sure that a sixth-grader hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost surely produce at least half of a Carry On script. It was the irreproducible effect of Williams' diction, archly drawing out every cut-glass syllable so that for approximately one zeptosecond it sounded like a perfectly reasonable thing for an Edwardian scientist to brag about to his guests before the audience's brain caught up to the bold-faced lowbrow of the joke and exploded. The spirited contributions of the actor's nostrils are also not to be underestimated. I can find no evidence that Williams was ever involved in a production of The Mikado and it saddens me: he was born for Pooh-Bah's line about being born sneering. I am also sorry that he and Fenella Fielding never seem to have been paired in another Carry On. Their brother-sister act, him such a high-strung live wire he's in danger of literally running down, her vampirically smoldering to the point of actual combustion, is the best I've seen in the old dark house genre since Riff Raff and Magenta.

You laughing, waving in your pinstripe double-breasted suit, me with my head in my hands

On the morning of November 11th I was called into the Colonel's room "to take some notes from the telephone." They were all there and got up and made room for me at the table. I think they must have thought that I knew shorthand which I didn't. A voice, very clear, thank God, said "Ready?" and began to dictate the Terms of the Armistice. They muttered a bit crowding round me and I said fiercely "Oh shut up I can't hear!" and the skies didn't fall.

I wrote in my own private short-long-hand and half my mind was in a prayer that I should be able to read it back. I could hear my heart thumping and hear the silence in the room around me. When the voice stopped I said mechanically "understood" and got up.

I made four copies of what I had written and took them in and went back to my little office staff and told them. I can't remember much what we said: I can only remember being so cold, and crying, and trying not to let the others see.

That night it was all over Paris. There were sounds of cheering and rejoicing down the Boulevards as I walked home. What I thought of was "Recessional." The Pension produced some champagne at dinner and we drank the loyal toast. And then across the table G. lifted her glass to me and said "Absent". I did not know her story nor she mine, but I drank to my friends who were dead and to my friends who, wounded, imprisoned, battered, shaken, exhausted, were alive in a new, and a terrible world.

—May Wedderburn Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices (1976)