Wilt

Following Bainbridge at reference 1, I was moved to procure Wilt by Tom Sharpe, a comic novel said to be based on his time at what was then called the Tech at Cambridge, now the Anglia Ruskin University, to be found at reference 3. A grandeur which, it seems, was being dreamed of even back in Sharpe's day. A place where, as it happens, my younger brother used to teach, so I do have a bit of inside knowledge.

A book which was to be found in our branch of Waterstone's, so no need to scour the Oxfam shop across the road, let alone flash my plastic with Amazon. An easy enough read of something over 300 pages.

A book which, for me, started well, then got deep into smut, which I found a bit tiresome. Eventually, the story resumed and it was, indeed, very funny. So funny in fact that I had to stop reading from time to time unless I did myself an injury - something that has not happened to me for a very long time. Not least because I am not usually attracted to books described as funny or comic. Never mind the sort of smut I associate with the stand up comics one sometimes comes across in seedy pubs, rather than with respectable writers.

The principal targets of all this are the Tech and its staff, particularly the senior staff, and the local plod. I don't suppose that either staff or plod were very pleased with their portrayal - but at least Sharpe had the good sense not to write the book while he was still there. Various swipes at various others, including a dodgy bachelor parson fond of a drop, somewhere out in the fens. And I should add, in defence of the smut, that it is the various reactions of all concerned to what became rather public smut which drives the novel along. No smut, no novel. No doubt the television version found some workable compromise - but I may never know, as it has not made its way into the world of ITVX, from whom we presently buy our television.

I don't think I will be revealing too much by saying that foundation piling has a part to play in all this. Something which I could relate to, having had experience, in the late 1960's, of testing the low grade concrete that got poured into the holes in the ground drilled by machines something like that snapped above. I remember particularly getting a bit of double bubble by doing this in the middle of the night - and coming close to tumbling down an unprotected hole in the dark. 

I forget what I did between packing up at the end of the afternoon and turning out for the midnight shift. Presumably not sitting in some pub, as I am still here to tell the tale. Split shifts always a bit of a problem in that way.

PS 1: I find now that there is a whole series of these Wilt books, of which I imagine this one is the first. But I doubt whether I shall be investigating.

PS 2: Friday: this morning I associate to slash and burn. A successful writer makes a home in one milieu, writes a few stories about it, and then, having burnt his or her boats, has to move onto a new milieu. And so it goes on. I think I first came across this model in a biography of a once-famous writer of the inter-war years, one Elinor Glyn. A writer I first came across in the margins of a life-boat station on the Isle of Wight.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/trolley-572.html.

Reference 2: Wilt - Tom Sharpe - 1976.

Reference 3: https://www.aru.ac.uk/. 

Reference 4: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097891/. The LWT version.