To not dishonour the dead
Crossword fans will have spotted that ‘Dicky Star’ is an anagram of yardstick, and that ‘garden rule’ can be used to produce the same solution, but there are other kinds of predictions going on here too. Some are retrospective but that doesn’t make the prophecies they contain any less striking. (The writer and broadcaster Ken Hollings reminded me of the McLuhan quote: ‘To be a good prophet never predict anything that has not already happened.’) There is a connection, too, perhaps to the divinatory aspect of storytelling: Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies. So, somehow out of this mandated vocabulary, the yardsticks and the coverage of a broken Dungeness, it becomes clear to Laura and Jeremy that if there were a nuclear disaster in the UK it would be covered up in a different way than in the Soviet Union. It would be displaced by the deployment of a new myth based on some traditional, typically English, craft-based activity.
The mighty Tony White interviewed by Richard Marshall.