69 for 1

by Alan Coren

  Before you open your luxury catalogue to partake of the boundless joys within, take just a moment to savour the handsome cover. Embracing beauty and practicality, it has been fashioned from a bespoke glossy paper which may be personally wiggled about to reflect all sorts of light – sun, bedside lamp, chandelier, powerful torch, or even a big candle – and artist-designed to confer the immense pleasure which may be derived from examining, in your own home, absolutely free, two delightful teddy bears pulling a glistening cracker in front of a fireplace decked with boughs of holly in which a mysterious snow-covered boot may be glimpsed descending.

  Opening the catalogue – which has been cleverly constructed so as to be operable to both left- and right-handed users – you will notice that each magnificent full-colour life-size page is equipped with its own individual number, expertly chosen to correspond to the page it is on, in elegant time-honoured numerals. Lowering your head to partake of the joy of these more closely, you will be amazed to discover that the page you are perusing gives off a wondrous fragrance which superbly complements its rich silky feel. This antique-style odour is put in at the secret location where the no-expense-spared printing is carried out by skilled hands which have been passed on from father to son for countless generations. (Caution: while every attempt has been made to ensure that these voluptuous pages are allergen-free, it is possible – in just a very few cases – that prolonged and/or deep sniffing may cause sneezing, eye-watering, or a rash. If symptoms persist, consult a qualified specialist, or dial 999, where you will be swiftly put through to a team of specially trained operators standing by, day and night, to deal with valued customers who may have caught something off a catalogue.)

  And now it is time to savour what is actually to be found on these pages, starting with the copious original illustrations commissioned from a myriad of top-of-the-range photographers who have pooled their genius to bring you (following hours of painstaking selection by major experts, many with fine university degrees in this sort of work) a truly breathtaking range of captivating pictures so diverse that only an exclusive Christmas gift catalogue can offer them to a discerning clientele prepared to be thrilled by their incomparability. Be it a charming snap of a winsome Yorkie modelling monogrammed dogs’ boots, a dramatic landscape depicting snow-sprinkled Buddhas of various sizes holding cork-extruders for relaxed al fresco drinking (bottles not included), an intimate study of a car-cover in flame-proof Nepalese candlewick, or a dramatically lit portrait of an onyx haddock singing one of three Scottish lullabies (please state which when ordering), every picture tells a story you and your loved ones will never tire of hearing. And as if all this were not enough, beneath each graphic masterpiece you will find an exquisite paragraph fashioned, just for you, from a plenitude of hand-wrought words fully guaranteed to be unavailable anywhere else.

  Wall Game

  YES, you are not wrong, I am back. As a matter of fact, I am as back as it is possible for me to be. I am up a ladder leaning against my back wall. I am not here in order to say ‘hello, wall, I am back, too, I missed you’, I am not even up here to thank the wall for the terrific job it did in protecting the house that the wall is at the back of, I am up here because I have come back to discover that the terrific job it did is in jeopardy. I am up here because I have been asked to sack the wall, and I wanted to run my hand along the top of it just to make sure of something before I let fly at the people who want to take my back wall’s livelihood away. I intend to fight to save its job.

  It has being doing that job unswervingly for nigh on 200 years. I say unswervingly, but it has, not surprisingly, grown a bit buckled in service, it has lost its ruddy youth, it has got mossy, it has been nibbled away by this climbing creeper and that, but as for the climbers it was formally employed to keep out, it has never failed: it has deterred Regency footpads and Jack the Ripper, it has seen off all three Krays and Osama bin Laden, it has taken it upon itself to reassure Mrs Coren and me and all who preceded us down the long arches of the criminal years that we may pick up our buckets and spades with a light and carefree heart and decamp to wherever in the world our fancies took us, in the sure and certain knowledge that our premises were in the safe hands of our back wall.

  That is because it has broken glass along the top. It is very old glass: this is a back wall you could lorry onto the Antiques Road Show to bring the serried experts whimpering gratefully to their knees. But now the council wants me to chisel it off: I have just arrived home to discover among the teetering pile of mail a curt note informing me that the glass on my back wall constitutes a danger to anyone who might want to climb over it. Which is why I have come down off the ladder, now, and into the house, and vaulted over the bags that Mrs Coren is unpacking – silently, because the years have taught her not to ask a man why he has brought only one sandal back when he has, without even a sidelong glance, hurtled past a screen on which South Africa has just lost its eighth wicket for only 81, this is a man with priorities – grabbed a telephone and begun letting myself be bounced from one to another of 183 different departments which would not exist without my heavy subsidy until I at last find myself in contact with a prong who explains that the glass-on-wall initiative is part of the ongoing policy of care in the community. Broken glass on top of a wall could mean that someone might get hurt.

  I am very patient with him. My voice is hardly more than a shriek when it points out that I am the community and what I care about is someone who might get hurt when there is no glass on top of a wall to stop hurters from climbing in. For this I get a literally sharp answer: the prong suggests a prickly shrub. I observe that it would take a prickly shrub ten years to grow to deterrent height, does he appreciate how many household chattels could disappear over the course of 4000 days and nights? By 2013 I might not have even one sandal to stand up in, and anyway, what is the difference between a villain cutting his hand on a bit of beer-bottle and poking his eye out on a thorn, is there an ongoing policy about organically grown sharp things? But he merely invites me to ring my local Crime Prevention Officer; who says, yes, a glass-topped wall could be construed as an offensive weapon, and when I reply that I would be prepared to sign a piece of paper promising not to pick my wall up and chase a burglar down the street with it, insists that this is a serious matter, I could well find myself in trouble if a thief were hurt on my premises. He does not elaborate, but hanging in the air between us, I can tell, is the reminder that Tony Martin has recently left a cell vacant, Mrs Coren could soon be repacking my bag.

  Where might this not end? I do not tell him I have coated my drainpipes with slippery paint – it is possible that a second-storey man might not make it past the first floor, break his ankle, and leave the courts to decide which of us gets six months – nor that my burglar alarm is a bit loud, it could quite literally frighten the life out of a villain with a dodgy ticker, nor that I have a sash-window that comes down, uninvited, at a hell of a lick and could easily leave an intruder’s head rolling around on my bedroom carpet. I merely thank him, and ring off, because I have been up the ladder and I know two things. I know that my broken glass is very old, and I know that this is a listed building, and no one may touch a hair of its heritage fabric without asking the freeholder’s permission. The freeholder is the Crown. I intend to do nothing. The council may write to the Queen, if it has the bottle.

  Smart Money

  FREE internet access, we read, means such parlous times for academic books that publishers are suggesting corporate subsidy. This bothers me: hardbacks may well fall prey to kickbacks . . .

  From: PATHOLOGY OF MARSUPIAL MUSCULATURE

  ‘. . . come now to the most specialised of the wallabies, the Petrogale, or Rock Wallaby. These have feet adapted to their habitat and tails employed solely as balancing organs, not for the purpose of advancing the animal in the more familiar ‘tripod’ progression.

  Thus, the Rock Wallaby may take up to 15.7 seconds to move from rest to 30mph, i.e. far slower than even the cheapest Dats
ubishi in the 2007 range, the elegant yet economical Loganberry 1.3, which is further distinguished from the Rock Wallaby by having, as standard fitments, heated wing-mirrors, fog-light, sat-nav, William Tell hooter, and luminous hot beverage holder! Incredible, cry top zoologists, how do they do it for only £8,799?

  Lacking a fog-light, the Rock Wallaby is at an unquestionable disadvantage in murky weather, when it could easily jump straight into a tree and drop any hot beverage it happened to be carrying. Furthermore, unlike the Loganberry, the Rock Wallaby will not hold its secondhand value, due in no small measure to the durability of the car’s chic Nippotex upholstery. In tests, nine out of ten zoologists could not tell Nippotex from Rock Wallaby fur, and were amazed when the commonest Rock Wallaby parasite, Siphonaptera nausica, or rectal flea, jumped in their hundreds from the marsupial’s pelt into the Nippotex and began breeding enthusiastically. As for servicing . . .’

  From: COMING OF AGE IN MELANESIA

  ‘. . . selects the bride of his choice by sticking his finger in her ear, and mimicking the cry of the toadhawk.

  The rest of the village then pelt the couple with nuptial loaves baked in the shape of external genitalia, and bring the bride-to-be decorated packages containing everything from ox curd and tooth-paint to rattan room-dividers and ape-face pillows.

  To set these rituals in an illustrative context, it is not unlike having a wedding list at Harridges, the store globally renowned for quality and service. Whereas the lusty Koi-Koi warrior sticks his finger in his beloved’s ear, the young Englishman visiting the superb Knightsbridge jewellery department will find a breathtaking range of engagement rings to suit every taste. These are not, of course, to be stuck in the ear. As for the gift needs of guests, while they will not find festive loaves or bits of ape, there are amazing bargains in Waterford crystal, table lighters (for lighting cigarettes, not tables), Irish linen, doorchimes, personalised stationery, and – a particular Harridge feature – pouffes of every kind. And just as the Koi-Koi father will shrink the head of his new daughter-in-law’s least favourite . . .’

  Radio Fun

  TODAY is a really big day. That is why I have just finished servicing and polishing my father’s old Ferguson. See how it gleams! Savour how it smells!

  Hear how it thunders when I start it up!

  I haven’t given my old man’s Ferguson such a seeing to in the 15 years since he died, when I took it from his place and brought it to mine. I should say here (since it has just occurred to me that unlikely pictures may be forming in your mind’s eye), that it is not an old Ferguson tractor, it is an old Ferguson wireless. It was given to my parents as a wedding present in 1935, and a very snazzy present it was; I stress this only because younger readers may think of a wireless, if they even know the word, as a titchy plastic box you clip onto your belt for jogging. They may never have seen a walnut and rosewood number the size and simulacrum of a Sheraton sideboard, standing on four sturdy cabriole legs, with six brass knobs on the front to fine-tune three enormous dials that glow in three different colours to let you know they’re in business, we are Long, Short and Medium, sir, begging your pardon, sir, and we are here to serve you, we await your pleasure, sir, you have only to twiddle. It is a wireless worth getting married for.

  And, culturally speaking (which it did), it brought me up. For the first dozen years of my life, much of what I learned and most of what I enjoyed came to me through this huge speaker cunningly fretworked into, for some reason, a spray of roses. Even after 1950, when my old man bought a TV set as big as a wardrobe (whose giant oak doors nevertheless revealed a screen as big as a fag-packet), thereby so filling our little front room with electronic carpentry that only two people could ever watch or listen at a time, the third having to stand in the hall, it was the radio that did the business. Not only did it teach me more of this and that (though not, in those Reithian times, the other) than any schoolteacher ever did, it also entertained me better than anyone I ever knew: it seamlessly graduated me from Uncle Mac and Toytown and Just William and Norman and Henry Bones – subtitled The Boy Detectives, despite the fact that Norman was queenie old Charles Hawtrey and Henry was matronly old Marjorie Westbury, a weekly Radio Times revelation that not only never bothered me at all, but probably did much to explain the infinitely elastic unbigotry for which I am a byword today – to Take It From Here and The Goon Show and Ray’s A Laugh and Hancock’s Half-Hour and all the myriad other comic masterpieces from the Golden Age of Ears.

  I look at the Ferguson now, and I hear it then. See these three dials? Clock not only all the poignantly yesteryear Anglophone stations, Hilversum and Daventry, Allouis and Athlone, and, yes, Valetta and Cairo – there is a map of the world on the back of the set, faded now but still half pink where once it was half red – but also Oslo and Ankara and Prague and Paris and Breslau and many a polyglottal dozen more. Oft in the stilly night, I used to creep past the door rattling in concert with my old man’s nostrils, and pad downstairs, and switch the Ferguson on, and wait while the dials began slowly to glow and the valves to hum and the speaker to whistle as I spun the dial in search of microphones a thousand crackling miles across the night. I learnt a lot of French that way, and doubtless no small smattering, now sadly lost, of Lapp and Urdu.

  It was, of course, only mine exclusively in the wee small hours: in the huge large ones, it served all three of us. Sometimes in pairs: since it took two people to move it so that my mother would have room to put up the ironing-board, I would occasionally hang around to listen to Mrs Dale’s Diary; tricky for her, because, though she enjoyed having me there, the script would from time to time daringly offer a mildly gynaecological moment, and my mother dreaded questions. Care for another pairing? Me sitting with my old man as the football results came in and he checked his pools coupon, not because I chose to but because my mother knew if I was there he wouldn’t swear.

  But the proper pairing for today is one I didn’t join. It was just them. You know why today is a really big day? Because it is Neville Chamberlain’s birthday. If he were alive today he’d be 134, and people would pay good money to look at him, but when he was 70, what people did was listen to him. And it was on this Ferguson that he told my parents that no such undertaking had been received and in consequence this country was at war. Which is why I have fettled it. I rather fear it is time to switch it on again.

  A Bit On The Side

  EXCITED by the interview in Monday’s Times with H. Cameron Barnes, here from America to promote his self-help book Affair!, thousands of you have written to ask me whether there is similar aid for British adulterers eager to kick over the marital traces without being found out. Alert to your every need, I have plucked a few forbidden fruit from the Internet . . .

  RUBBER BRIDGE. Despite the most meticulous timing and calculations, many men, having slipped from the nuptial sack after the wife has dropped off in mid-headache, find they are unable to return to it from their little friend’s apartment before dawn breaks. Why not avoid those dangerous crosstown dashes by bridging your absence with the sensational My Old Man? My Old Man is, when inflated, a full-size husband: you simply slide out of bed, slide My Old Man in, carefully pump him up, stick his head under your pillow, and leave. Should you return after sun-up, your wife will notice nothing! While she is cooking your breakfast, you can slip back covertly, deflate My Old Man in seconds, and saunter downstairs without a care in the world. Order NOW from PO Box 18, Tring, only £49.95 (pyjamas not included).

  CHERCHEZ LA FEMME. Hot flushes are a common female complaint, often brought on by the question: ‘What did you do today, I tried to ring you?’ Now you can exchange that blush for a smug smile! Our brilliant RUN OFF MY FEET COMPENDIUM offers women a fabulous range of watertight alibis, including two Tupperware buckets, ten used bingo cards, four plastic bags (Safeway, Liberty, Ikea, Bergdorf Goodman), six Odeon stubs, three dental appointment notices, two failed MoT certificates, a soiled and numbered marathon vest, a black veil and armband, and a Cordo
n Bleu diploma on genuine vellumette with your name embossed in gold!

  Ring 083971 66547 for details. No salesman will call, unless you fancy a big Greek plumber with liquid eyes and a skin like watered silk.

  DO YOU REQUIRE a full-colour set of professional photographs of your affair, handsomely bound and mailed by us to relatives and friends? If the answer is no, then a cheque for £1000, popped in the post right this minute, will instantly dissuade our crack team of paparazzi from springing out on you (or in on you) in the small hours. SNAP DECISIONS, 4a, Grole House, SW9 3HH.

  DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER – which could well be acutely embarrassing. What you should be after is something that says Thank You My Darling and rots without trace as soon as possible. For example, why not a psittacosis-riddled macaw? A mere £750, yet it shrieks ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ over and over again for several hours, before dropping dead. Or perhaps your own effigy in Neapolitan ice-cream, decorated with erotic messages in little silver balls which fall off into illegibility after five minutes at room temperature, only £50 (hot fudge sauce extra)?