Howard delivers a corking rabbit

The sun was out and summer clearly felt in the offing for our April meeting—surely the perfect conditions for Matthew Howard once again to try and negotiate the fine line between cheeky innocence and knowing offensiveness. You know something is up when strangers wander in and you instinctively feel the urge to explain, “It’s not what it seems.”

Mr Howard’s subject this time was Cockney rhyming slang, and he did manage to tell us the origins of a few such terms, although a cynic might argue that they were really an excuse to show pictures of boobs and reminisce wistfully about Viz magazine’s comic strip concerning gypsies for which the editors later had to apologise (unconvincingly). Howard’s style is unique, a series of sight gags where a verbal set-up is followed by a punchline in the form of the next slide. It was a style that was impossible to replicate in print, back when essays of each talk appeared in the magazine, but fortunately the talks nowadays are filmed and you can see the result on our YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/vWQ9dJyVkVM.

You can also see further still images from the evening on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/sheridanclub/albums/72177720333451013.