A <pedant> writes </pedant>

Recently, while on the Tube, we found a (rather grubby) page containing the text you read below. The page in question is clearly only the first page of a longer document, and we were deeply intrigued by it. We would love to hear from anyone who has a copy of the other pages, since we would like to know how the text ends.

Please email us direct on pedant at waz.easynet.co.uk if you can shed any light on this most unusual of mysteries.

A Brief History Of The Bog Standard

As many British readers will no doubt be aware, the UK in fact came off the Bog Standard in 1931 as a result of the Great Depression. However, this was by no means the case across Europe, and with ever closer moves towards harmonisation in the EU, the chances of an early UK return to the standard are greater by the day. As befits such a topic of vital importance to one and all, it is necessary, in order to fully understand it, to be aware of the general outline of the history involved.

Precursors

The first attempts at creating a unified Bog Standard all, of course, failed, but it is interesting to note that none of them differed in any significant way from the specification introduced to the world in 1743 by Sir Thomas Cradock, with the exception of James O'Reilly's somewhat harebrained O'Reilly Scheme of 1672.

The O'Reilly Scheme, a complex and intimidating arrangement of ropes, levers and trapdoors, was designed on the basis that the human body and its functions were essentially nothing more than the work of the devil, a theological position maintained by many at the time (and since), despite the very clear evidence to the contrary set out in Genesis Chapters 1 and 2.

Notwithstanding this, O'Reilly's scheme, drawings of which are frequently cited as key to the understanding of both Heath Robinson and Jackson Pollock, never actually caught on, and only three or four conveniences were ever built according to the O'Reilly specification, one of which was responsible for O'Reilly's tragic death in 1679 when one of the pieces of sandpaper was ground so hard against the granite block that the resulting sparks were in fact sufficient to ignite the wooden part of the structure into which O'Reilly had strapped himself the previous night as penance for his misdeeds (see Dig. 1)...