About

This website, or blog IF YOU MUST, is called Come friendly bombs.

The site is named this way for a variety of reasons, but the phrase comes from Englishman Sir John Betjeman, who in 1937 wrote a slight little poem entitled ‘Slough’. Read on and the magic of rhyming poetry will leave you in no doubt how ‘Slough’ is pronounced, English orthographical perversities notwithstanding.

It goes like so:

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death! &c.

Through the magic of the internet’s dogged determination to put all knowledge everywhere right here right now, you can see the whole poem here. Now.

Ricky Gervais, in the guise of David Brent, a favorite nonfictional character of ours who happens to head up the Slough branch of Wernham Hogg paper merchants in a slight little English television show, nominally a comedy, called The Office, provides a particularly acute exegesis of Betjeman’s poetic agenda in this YouTube video:

Our decision to name this site Come friendly bombs is not based at all on utter desperation, as far as you know.

Come friendly bombs is also built upon the smoldering rubble of the once proud and noble isoglossia.com, and is a daughter thereto.

(‘Come’ in this case, not being a noun, cannot be said to be vocative in case, but as a verb it is certainly more entreating than it is imperative.)

‘Vocative’ means something like ‘to call upon’. Oh bombs!

It’s been said that years later Sir John expressed regret about having written the poem in the first place. We know how he feels.