Nincompoop #58: A Giant, Yes, But with a Relatively Small Penis

You never know what (or who) you might find, as you wander the British Isles. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE

When the mood strikes, I run excerpts from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG NINCOMPOOP, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. If you become a paid subscriber, you can access the complete archive here!)

My memoir details the story of my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the the Paris Metro, and roared off on the road to elsewhere. I was lost, but that’s the only way to get found, right? After Paris, I moved on to Olde England, to check out where that Shakespeare guy lived. In this excerpt, I’m tramping around in the south of England, consorting with giants.

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RAMBLING IS THE U.K. NATIONAL PASTIME, pursued by eccentric grannies in galoshes, tweedy adventurers in Wellington boots, everybody with a dog, and 92% of the rest of the population. It also attracted Bill Bryson, who wrote about walking there, mostly in the rain, in his sodden and hilarious book Notes from a Small Island.

Buy it new, here! Or cheap, here!

“It occurred to me,” Bryson wrote, and I wish I had, “what a remarkably small world Britain is. That is its glory, you see—that it manages at once to be intimate and small scale, and at the same time packed to bursting with incident and interest. You can stand on Snow's Hill at Windsor and see, in a single sweep, Windsor Castle, the playing fields of Eton, the churchyard where Gray wrote his ‘Elegy,’ the site where The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed. Can anywhere on earth be, in such a modest span, a landscape more packed with centuries of busy, productive attainment?”

At the time Bryson did his UK perambulations, in the early 1990s, he was still a few years out from being able to stand on Snow’s Hill and see the Legoland Resort, now in spitting distance (if you’re a really good spitter) from Windsor Castle. Kingdom of the Pharaohs and Viking Land could have only added astonishment to Bryson’s view. 

My star seat above Amberley had views, mostly, of Amberley. But that was enough. Three-hundred and sixty degrees of rolling farm fields, inviting declivities, the bright promise of an entire ocean just beyond the horizon to the south, and—salut!—France a tantalizing presence over the earth’s curve to the east. 

Also out there: The town of Wilmington, home of a gargantuan hillside graffito known as the Long Man. He’s 235 feet tall, holding staves in both hands, and he’s inscribed into the hillside in chalk boulders in such a way as to look perfectly in proportion as you look up his skirts from below. Recently the female hosts of a UK TV show called Undress the Nation gathered a hundred women to trans-genderize the Long Man, by giving him breasts, fuller hips, and pigtails.

They were in the footsteps of another graffitist, who carried football-pitch spray paint onto the hillside and created the Schlong Man, with a 50'-tall phallus. Compare that with the 180’-foot tall Cerne Abbas Giant, who currently lords it over Dorset with a 36’ tall erection. (An ancient observer, as recounted in the New Yorker, said “Obviously, he’s in his early twenties.”) His phallus graces what is thought to be the only naughty (historical!) postcard that may be legally sent via the British Post. But it’s probably not an ancient erection. (Are there any?) In 1908, the Giant’s much smaller penis was re-cut in such a way as to connect his bellybutton with his foreskin. (Consult a urologist before attempting.) 

One theory holds that The Giant was carved into the hillside as a bit of political commentary. Lord Holles was a landowner in the Giant’s region in the 1600s, and he had a special antipathy toward Oliver Cromwell, which may have caused him to create a mocking, 180’ political cartoon. Which could explain the relatively tiny dick, pre-enhancement. 

This puny-sceptred isle! This inadequate England!

So I was bookended by giants: Another reason to feel shrimpy. But my star seat gave me elevation and perspective, which I made a note of in a late-night journal entry: “Worth remembering today, on the fourth day past the full moon: I had the tremendous pleasure to take a late night walk on the Downs; stars, moonlight, the mist of the Wild Brooks, the sighing of dispeptic cows, and my own long shadow on the frosty ground. If my life can be filled with experiences like this, it must be fulfilling.” 

Only I struck out “filled with,” on the page, replacing the active verb with the passive construction “passed in.”

The passive voice is a triple escape hatch: It presages failure, explains why you failed, and makes it inevitable. Life is in the active verbs, not passive surrender. The fault, dear nincompoop, was not in your stars, but in your sentence structure.

“I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, 'Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!' Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.” ― Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island

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