Isadora Persano

Dorothy Sayers said that the Holmesian game “must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord’s; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere.”

Maybe not. I present to you Isadora Persano, my burlesque performance alter ego. 

I chose the name because I liked the idea of a canonical reference and because the combination of the female name 'Isadora' with the fact that the character is explicitly described as male fitted with the fact that whilst I am myself male, I also crossdress, and perform burlesque en femme. Anyway, whilst I have performed as part of a troupe in the past, last Saturday saw me perform my first solo as Isadora, with a proper intro and, of course, my own curtain call. I doubt many members of the audience recognised the name or its source, but it gave me a thrill hearing it, and I thought I'd share it with you as well.

Here's our group at the curtain call:

And here's Isadora again, second from right, as part of a Vegas Showgirl routine we performed in the same show.

I even have a short bio:

"From the naughty Nineteenth Century comes well-known journalist and duelist Isadora Persano. This crossdressing chrononaut delivers a dose of Victorian vivacity and gender-bending jollity to the stage. Catch them now, because who knows when their temporal travels will whisk them away to new adventures?"

Anniversary

30 years ago today I went to a meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. After the meeting I was talking to a friend at the bar, when this random woman came up and butted into our conversation.

Anyway, long story short, l eventually married her.

I'm still married to her ...

The Best Of The Professionals

A limerick I wrote many years ago that popped back into my head this evening whilst watching Granada's 'The Empty House'.

For as long as the Game has been played
This problem has vexed man and maid
It's really quite hard
Do you say Lestrade?
Or do you pronounce it Lestrade?

Just Stories

Over the weekend I finally finished reading the Canon. Well, I say 'reading'; what I mean is 're-reading' because, obviously, I've read all sixty Sherlock Holmes stories a number of times. Indeed when I was younger, and less tied down with children and such, I used to make a point of reading the Sherlock Holmes stories once a year, just to keep them fresh in my mind.

It's been a while since I last read a Holmes story. In fact I'm not sure of the last time I did so. Fifteen years, maybe more. So back at the beginning of January I decided that it was time to read them again. I was off on a camping holiday, and looking for some reading to take with me, and packed the 'Adventures' and 'Memoirs', reasoning that they would be enough to see me through a week. I finished them when I got back, then did 'A Study In Scarlet', 'The Sign Of Four' and 'The Return', before moving on to 'The Hound of the Baskervilles', 'His Last Bow', 'The Valley of Fear' and finally 'The Casebook'. As you can see I didn't quite read them in publication order, but almost so. I read the Oxford edition, because whilst my venerable copy of the 'Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes' is more convenient, it's heavy to carry around (I like to read on the train, and also read in the park at lunchtime) and the print is getting a little small for my ageing eyes.

So, thus far I seem to have done little I've done before. However this time I found I was reading the stories as stories, and that was a new experience. You see, not long after I first read the stories I got sucked into the world of Holmesian societies and scholarship. So every time I read a Sherlock Holmes story there was always part of my mind that was pondering whether the dates were correct, or where Watson's wound was. I was always reading them as if it were for a test. Not this time. This time I just enjoyed them for what they were - stories. I savoured them; enjoyed the language and plots. And I found that I enjoyed them more than I had done for a long time.

What was interesting was that stories I didn't regard that highly read far better when I wasn't rating each one in terms of canonical and scholarly interest. And age seems to have mellowed me as well; stories I regarded as rather average when I was younger improved greatly when read by my older self reading for pleasure rather than intellectual gamesmanship.

So take the challenge. Ignore the scholarship. Cast it aside. Just read the stories. And enjoy them.

Why 'The Head Llamas'?

I realise that when I introduced this blog in my first posts I neglected to say why it's named the way it is. So let me rectify that.

Back in the early 1990s, Catherine and I were part of a society that encouraged people to set up their own local or specialist sub-groups. We thought that this might be fun, so we did so. Looking for a slant we settled on a group that covered our local area, but which also specialised in canonical natural history. Both of us are graduate biologists, so it's an area we both have an interest in. Looking for a suitable name, we settled on 'The Head Llamas' (derived, of course, from Doyle's error in EMPT). I can't say that we ever really got into our stride on the natural history front, but we organised various meets, predominantly at museums in London, and one very enjoyable one looking at canonical locations in Woking (the results of which will be published here at some stage).

As previously stated, life intervened and our Holmesian activities declined, and with the The Head Llamas. But it seemed a suitable banner under which to post the articles I wanted to share. So that's what you get.

Reminiscences

This is that most difficult part of any new blog – the first post.

What’s this blog for? Well, many years ago I was a member of several Sherlock Holmes societies in the UK. Indeed it was through one of them that I met my wife, nearly 25 years ago. I got sucked into the delightful Great Game of mock-serious scholarship that was played in such societies and, as such, was guilty of one or two pieces on various aspects of the stories. These pieces saw publication in journals that were, sometimes, obscure even by the standards of Holmesian societies, but they were at least read by one or two people other than me.

Time moved on. My wife and I started a family, acquired new interests and even moved to another country. Our Holmesian activities faded over time, and we let our memberships lapse. We never really lost interest in Holmes (as our bookshelves testify), but neither was our interest particularly active.

However we now find ourselves on the home-stretch of parenthood, and with two children who enjoy a good crime story, on TV at least. They like ‘Sherlock’. They’ve enjoyed the odd episode of the Granada Holmes series from the 1980s. Interest in Holmes has increased in our household. And whilst looking for something (like you do) I rediscovered the various things I’d written.

The thing is, though, they were in my copies of the journals in which they were published. The original electronic versions have long gone, lost with the floppy disks they were stored on. So I have set about finding every article I can, and scanning them, so I have electronic versions of them once more. And I thought it would be fun to share them, to a new, online, audience. A blog seemed the easiest way to do this.

And that is what, for now, this blog will be about. Every so often I will release on of my pieces into the wild. I hope that you will find something to enjoy in them. It’s certainly been strange for me; they were written half a lifetime ago, by a person I now only dimly remember but who was, it is obvious, having far too much fun.

Read. Enjoy. Comment if you like.