The Devil was enjoying his day off. If he was being honest with himself, he worked very little these days, but didn't like to think of himself as retired. Idle days felt better when you were supposed to be doing something else.

The fete had been advertised around the village - an old-fashioned event in the Orchard, some community-building after covid. The Devil had often visited before the land was cleared, spending time with an apple-tree spirit that would have disappeared with the trees. It would be his first time back.

After paying the pound coin to get in, the Devil had a lurch of temporal vertigo. The stalls and games looked like something from the past: a tombola stall; hoopla; a coconut shy; welly throwing  "Want to try a game of 'splat the rat'?" someone called over.

"What's that?" asked the Devil.

The stallholder, a posh woman in a sun hat, explained. The rat was a beanbag wrapped in fake fur. It was dropped into a drainpipe and the Devil had to wait at the other end with a mallet. He was supposed to hit the rat as emerged from the pipe and slid down a sheet of wood, three goes for a pound. If he managed to hit it before it reached the ground, he would win a bag of sweets - which was obviously worth somewhat less than a pound.

After six attempts the Devil moved on. He only had a handful of pound coins and didn't want to spend them at the first game. There was a china smash, skittles, hook-the-duck. The local vicar was in the stocks for wet sponges to be thrown at him - but the Devil wasn't wasting money on that when he'd already planned his own retribution.

There was still a queue for ice-cream, and the Devil joined the back. Once he'd have beguiled the people ahead of him, had them walk away, but he decided to be patient. He was still some way from the front when the woman from the 'Splat the Rat' stall came over.

"We're looking for some volunteers to judge the apple pie competition. Would you be up for it?"

The Devil knew a thing or two about apples and said he would be delighted. He left the queue and followed the woman to a marquee. He'd not been in here yet to see the cakes and art produced for the competitions. He smiled at the entries for the Most Phallic Vegetable competition. A row of seats behind a table and one waited for him. The woman showed him the judging form, with marks for categories including 'crust moistness' and 'flavour of filling'.

Thin wedges of pie were laid in front of him, and he took a few bites with a cake-fork, one from the body, one from the thickest part of the crust. The pastry was perfect, the apples even better. The Devil decided he liked retirement. He liked that he'd lived long enough for people to give him apples.

Background

I still have a few stories I need to write to complete the Devil’s story within my longer South Downs Way sequence. I also have a lot of stories to write about the Apple Tree Man. Completing this sequence is taking far longer than I expected (as Hofstadter's law says, everything takes longer than you think). I’ve written almost a hundred stories for this now, and need to start arranging them so I can try to finish.

I remember village fetes from growing up. The strangest thing was the craze for piano smashing. I’ve blogged about this as it seems like such an odd memory. Even in the 80s the country had countless domestic pianos which needed to be got rid of. The solution the English came up with was the ‘sport’ of piano smashing. How quickly could a team break down a piano into pieces small enough to post through a standard letterbox?

There was an official world record for this, which stood at 2 minutes 7 seconds. The sport was included in It’s a Knockout, until viewer complaints forced its removal.

The Financial Times article, Whatever Happened to Britain’s Pianos is a good one. Written in 2019, it talks about the problems of pianos - I didn’t realise there were specialist removal companies for them. There’s also a good reference to piano ghosts.

Announcements

• Check out this promo video for Rosy Carrick’s Poetry Gang-Bang, which is taking place in Brighton on May 21st and 22nd. I’ll be performing on the second night, alongside Chris and Lou who appeared in True Clown Stories. Tickets available online.

Recommendations

I first read I Hate the Internet following a recommendation by John Higgs. By the end of the book, I felt depressed and pessimistic. John responded that 'pessimism is for lightweights'. Returning to the novel a few years later and it's a strange experience. Kobek's discussion about the effects Twitter turned out to be less cynical than the reality.

ONE OF THE CURIOUS ASPECTS of the Twenty-First Century was the great delusion amongst many people, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, that freedom of speech and freedom of expression were best exercised on technological platforms owned by corporations dedicated to making as much money as possible.

Kobek compares companies getting rich from User-Generated Content to the way Marvel and DC got rich from not properly paying people like Jack Kirby. He is furious about the way in which Twitter made money from rape and death threats sent to Caroline Criado-Perez. Kobek also has a lot to say about the comic industry ("subtle pornography for the mentally backwards") and the literary novel (taking the view that this was a CIA plot). Race and gentrification are also important themes.

Kobek writes with a heavily ironic tone as he explains and tries to defamiliarise - something that I found wearing on this read-through. At its best, the book feels a lot like an angry Vonnegut. While the book didn't work for me on a second read, it's one I can see myself reading again in the future. Like Patricia Lockwood or Darcie Wilder, Kobek writes in a style that responds to the Internet. I've read a lot of his work, including a couple of the obscure ones, and I find him one of the most interesting writers working today.

I Hate the Internet was a warning to the future that was ignored, but it’s an intense, passionate book.