69 for 1

by Alan Coren

  When a man says something is all his wife’s idea, you may be sure that when you look into his eyes, they will tell you that when he says all, all is what he means. Not that this is the worst idea he has ever heard, only that he thinks it is. I have been driving cars for 50 years. All of them have been quick, all of them have been ragtops, most of them have been red. If I look down from my attic window now, I can see the last of the line. I am lucky enough to live in a house with great views, but the greatest is the one I am looking at right this minute. I shall not be able to look at it for long. On June 6, it will be delivered to someone else, to make way for what is delivered to me. I shall be looking at a toy with a top speed of 40 mph and a range of 40 miles. Today, I am Nuvolari, I am Fangio, I am Schumacher; but tomorrow I shall be Noddy. If I leap in and give it all the wellie there is, after an hour I shall have to knock on someone’s door to ask if I can use their plug.

  Unfit For Purpose

  IN a bid to curb binge drinking, the British Beer and Pub Association is to abolish happy hour.

  The small man set down the two pints on the table. The table wobbled.

  ‘It’s gone on me leg,’ said the tall man. He took out a handkerchief.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ said the small man. ‘You’ll smell on the bus. Worse if you have to blow your wossname. There may be pregnant women. They will complain the alcohol will affect the size of their baby. You will get thrown off. Arrested, possibly. My advice is to brush it off with your hand.’

  ‘It’s stained me trainers now,’ said the tall man, ‘you silly sod.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with trainers,’ said his friend. ‘We used to have proper shoes. You could widdle with impunity. Don’t talk to me about canvas.’

  ‘I widdle a lot more, these days,’ said the tall man.

  ‘Have you seen anyone about it?’

  ‘I have been on the waiting list,’ said the tall man, ‘since 1998.’

  ‘I told him not to fill the glasses right up. I can remember when this pub used to leave a good half-inch at the top. I can remember complaining about it.’ He took a sip. ‘But at least it used to taste like beer.’

  ‘EU regulations,’ said the tall man. ‘Brussels has specified that chemical rubbish has to be added to British draft bitter, to protect bottled Belgian. I presume that is also why you did not buy any pork scratchings, due to where they now have to come from more than one country of origin.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to eat anything a Polish pig scratched off,’ said the small man. ‘I thought about a pickled egg, though.’

  ‘But then you thought, bird flu, am I right?’

  ‘You are not wrong. I have eaten my last Chinese. Also Indian. They put cancer in to colour the sauce.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘What with catching diabetes off of hamburgers, that only leaves fish and chips.’

  ‘Not for long,’ said the tall man. ‘There’s only three cod left in the sea, and not more than half a dozen haddock. Do not even think about halibut. Any day now, we shall all be eating jellyfish.’

  ‘Provided we can stop it wobbling out of the packet on the way home.’

  ‘I’d eat it there if I were you,’ said the tall man. ‘You wouldn’t want to walk home and get your jellyfish took off you by a mob of hoodies. Also shot, in all probability.’

  ‘By a girl,’ said his friend. ‘Most violent crime is now committed by infant females. They are the ones who can afford guns, due to maternity benefit. Funny, they would be the first to start yelling if you pulled your handkerchief out on the bus, if they lost the baby they could never afford ammunition.’

  ‘I blame the North Koreans’ said the tall man. ‘If I was twelve, I’d want it all now, too, before an H-bomb fell on me. Or,’ he added, ‘an asteroid.’

  ‘Is that for definite?’

  ‘August 3, 2046. As agreed by all known scientists, nem con.’

  ‘Bloody hell, that is the day before my 90th birthday! I shall never draw my pension. I have worked it out and it could be as much as £4 a week.’

  The tall man shrugged. ‘You lose some, you lose some. My wife rang me one day last month and said her lottery number had come up. So I went out and bought a new Rover. When I got home she said the prize was a tenner.’ He cracked a knuckle. ‘And there were 60 of ‘em in the syndicate.’

  ‘I don’t know where any of us would be,’ said the small man, ‘if house prices hadn’t rocketed.’

  ‘We’ll soon find out,’ said the tall man. ‘According to reliable sources close to everybody who knows anything, we shall all be in negative equity by Christmas. I wouldn’t care, but I just spent a ton of money on a major roof extension for the wife’s mother. Next thing I know, it’s only gone and slid off the roof, hasn’t it? Bloody cowboys!’

  ‘Was she in it?’ enquired the small man.

  ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘Thinking of which,’ said the small man, ‘I turned on the radio yesterday morning while I was shaving, the way I always do, and instead of John Humphrys, it was Nicholas Parsons.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said the tall man. ‘I couldn’t finish my egg.’

  ‘Still, Today was back this morning.’

  The tall man drained his glass, and stood up. ‘Not before time,’ he said.

  A Little Touch Of Harry

  HERE are a few statistics about J. K. Rowling you may not yet have read.

  1. If all the published copies, hardback and paperback, in all translations, of the six Harry Potter books were laid flat, edge to edge, they would entirely cover Brazil.

  2. If, however, the Brazilian rainforest continued to be reduced at the current rate, by the afternoon of April 17, 2057 there would be room only for a single-volume tower of all the published copies of the, by then, seven Harry Potter books. It would be 48,977 miles high. It would be the only pile of books visible from Mars.

  3. Had, on May 16 last, J. K. Rowling put all her income from the five published Harry Potter books on Archer’s Folly in the 3.15 at Haydock Park, which came in by a short head at 100-1, she would have become richer than Bill Gates by £135.84. If, though, she had waited until this week’s publication of the sixth book and put all her accumulated money on Jiminy Cricket in the 2.45 at Sandown, she would now be in a position to buy North Dakota.

  4. The combined weight of all the six Harry Potter hardbacks, in all translations, is 143 tonnes heavier than Mount Snowdon. Were this to be added to the combined weight of all the six Harry Potter paperbacks, it would be 61 tonnes heavier than Ben Nevis.

  5. Of all the children, worldwide, who have bought a Harry Potter, only 32 per cent know it is a book. The largest category of those who think it is something else is the 27 per cent who think it is a box of tissues which opens at the side. The smallest category of those who think it is something else is the 0.0001 per cent located in an exclusive South Kensington finishing school, who believe it to be a deportment aid.

  6. Were all the semi-colons in all the Harry Potter books, in all translations, to be typed out in a straight line, they would circle the world twice. Bear in mind that there are no semi-colons in Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu or Inuit.

  7. If all cigarette manufacture suddenly stopped in China, and the 73 per cent of the population who smoked managed to get their hands on all the Harry Potter books ever published, in all translations, they would have enough paper to make themselves 20 roll-ups a day for the next 289 years.

  8. The quantity of adhesive used to secure all the pages of the six Harry Potter volumes to their bindings would be enough to cover Wales in linoleum floor tiles.

  9. Were the President of the United States ever to yield to pressure from fundamentalist Christian objectors and order every copy of Harry Potter to be burned, global warming would increase by 2.7 per cent. Even on the most optimistic estimate, this would leave only the top 18.7 metres of the Blackpool Tower visible.

  10. However, if, in the (admittedly unlikely) event of the President of the United Stat
es having signed up to the Kyoto Protocols, the books were not burned but pulped, enough material would be produced to rebuild Falluja entirely in papier-mâché.

  11. If each copy of every Harry Potter book published consisted of words different from those in every other copy, it is statistically more than likely that one of the books could have been typed by a chimpanzee.

  12. In a recent attempt by a team of mathematicians in Istanbul to work out how much J. K. Rowling had earned in Turkish lire (at 2,318.9 to the £), the university computer blew out all windows within a diameter of 300 metres.

  13. You do not have to share J. K. Rowling’s passion for necromancy to be troubled by the number 13. All you have to share is common superstition. For if all the copies of Harry Potter ever sold were to be placed in piles of 13 around the world, the statistical likelihood of anyone walking past one of them subsequently falling through an open manhole beggars belief.

  NB. All these statistics are taken from an advance copy of The Guinness Book of J. K. Rowling, to be published at midnight on July 31st. Those wishing to begin queuing outside bookshops now are advised to seek tickets for places at almost any website you can shake a broomstick at.

  Bang To Rights

  OH, to be in England – and the moment I stepped off Monday’s plane after four homesick weeks, I knew just why. So it is no accident that I launch the first farrago of my autumn term with that hoary cri de coeur, since it was the uproarious stand-up Hermann Goering who, when he heard the word culture, reached for his Browning, and his plucky Luftwaffe will shine brightly in what follows – along with the royal family, Enid Blyton, Claridge’s, the broad sunlit Cotswolds, the News of the World, and Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut, and you cannot get more cultural than that.

  All this, because the first thing I did at Heathrow was buy The Times. It held two glorious stories. The first concerned MI5’s revelation of the cunning 1940 plan by some Nazi Baldrick to parachute saboteurs into rationed Britain, who would distribute chocolate bars and tinned plums and fizzy drinks to the salivating war-deprived. The joyful beneficiaries would then scuttle off to gobble their covert goodies, and a few seconds later, blow themselves to bits, for the goodies the baddies had slipped them were bombs: you snapped the chocolate, opened the tin, unscrewed the bottle, and went bang.

  Can it be mere coincidence that these were the days of Enid Blyton’s pomp? I think not. I think the Abwehr, Teutonically meticulous as ever in their research, believed that in her they had discovered, quite literally, Britain’s soft underbelly. Tinned plums, chocolate, lashings of ginger beer? What is this if not Five Go Off To Blitzkrieg? The fact that not one booby trap worked is only further proof: for you and I know, though Jerry somehow failed to clock, that a nano second before any human was fragged, Timmy the Dog’s keen nose would have told him to bark a monitory ‘Arf Arf!’.

  And then I turned the page, to the second story. This also involved bibs, tuckers and the Third Reich. Some time ago, Princess Michael of Kent had sat down to a Gordon Ramsay corker at Claridges in the rapt company of a billionaire sheikh, because, though her Gloucestershire bolt-hole Nether Lypiatt was up for sale, it had not attracted much interest until the bloke in the sheet fronted up on its doorstep and began talking serious money. And, on their follow-up date, not only money: for, despite all the Michelin-starred stuff being noisily hoovered up through the nosebags, Mazher Mahmood still managed to persuade the mouth of the radiant vendor opposite to expound all manner of fascinating stuff about the royal family, inside dope (if she will pardon the expression) which, it appears, she had been fatally beguiled into imagining might be a useful part of her sales pitch. Not so. She had been conned. Her lunch date did not make his money by digging up oil, he made it by digging up dirt. He had been parachuted in by The News of the World with a smarter booby-trap than tinned plums.

  Now, my heart goes out to the Princess. She and I have been quite close, and I once took her to see the most erotic statue in London – it is, since I sense a raised eyebrow, of Sir Arthur Sullivan, and it may be viewed opposite the Embankment entrance to the Savoy, for those of you who are, as it were, curious – and her response was so earthy a giggle that grown men within a radius of perhaps 50 yards went off for a bit of a lie down. So it is not to compound her current embarrassment but to attempt to alleviate it that I remind you that, during the recent misunderstanding between her two countries, her father was a mounted SS officer. It is therefore not beyond the bounds of imagination to wonder whether – in, say, 1940 – he and his trusty horse might not have been parachuted into Britain with a saddlebagful of exploding Fruit & Nut.

  We now know that none of the bars went off. So it is not impossible that, in some attic of Nether Lypiatt, there is a brass-bound diddy-box of inherited mementoes containing, among the monocles and armbands and Lugers and cigarette-holders, a bar of chocolate, pristine in its cleverly forged Cadbury’s wrapper. Now, do those of us who still respect life’s social decencies not relish the idea of the Princess ringing up Mr Mahmood and inviting him down to let bygones be bygones, and, upon his departure, giving him a little snack for his homeward journey? I see her standing at a tall window, drawing aside a velvet swag the better to watch her tormentor stroll down the long drive, pause to snap off a nutty chunk, and blow his head all over Gloucestershire.

  Advertisements For Myself

  I WAS a lavatory, once. And a pretty convincing one, too, though I say it myself. Indeed, it was saying it myself that, eventually, made me convincing: what I had to say myself was ‘Watch out, germs! Here comes Harpic!’, and I had to say it over and over again, hundreds of times, until, as the long day’s sun sank below the wonky jalousie of my tiny Soho studio, I finally became the most convincing lavatory you ever heard. Truly bog standard.

  I don’t know, mind, if you did ever hear it. You would have to have been watching afternoon ITV, when those who constitute the target market for domestic hygiene take a short breathless break from mop and aerosol, plonk down before the box with mug and Hobnob, and are brainwashed into disinfectant seduction. You would not, of course, have seen me on that box: you would have seen only a cartoon khazi, the chirpy mouth on its twinkling upturned lid synchronised to my six mesmeric words.

  It was, sometime in the early ’80s, my big acting break. Sadly, the break itself broke a few ads later, after my voice-over roles as a dancing onion, a time-shared Spanish hovel, and a recently shrunken haemorrhoid unaccountably failed to convince any new advertising agents or their clients that I was irresistible commercial timber. Or, rather, timbre. I did a few auditions, was assured I would be let know, but never heard anything; except Richard Briers or Martin Jarvis or, on one particularly hurtful occasion, Sue Pollard, brilliantly playing what I had pitiably come to think of as my patio door, my egg-whisk, my cat meat.

  Which is why, instead of lolling on a burnished Bermudan poop guzzling pâté de foie gras and Dom Perignon from a couple of Asprey buckets while I wait for my helicopter to return with Cameron Diaz, I am still up here in the Camden loft, punching a keyboard. However, if you now direct your glance to the top of this column, you may well share my view that things could very soon take a swift turn for the better. That is because you read in last Wednesday’s Times that ‘drinks companies have been ordered to hire paunchy balding men for advertisements to meet new rules forbidding any link between women’s drinking and sex.’

  What has ordered the companies to do this is the Committee of Advertising Practice, which, exercised over female binge-boozing, is concerned that current ads showing Brad Pitt and Vinnie Jones supping Heineken and Bacardi respectively – even as George Clooney’s pen squiggles a £2.5 million Martini contract – will persuade young women that, were they to front up at the Rat & Cockle in good working order, they could reasonably expect much more than mere pints to be pulled.

  I have to say, despite the risk to what have suddenly become my great expectations, that I find the CAP’s argument a mite tricky to support. While I know none of the
se male glamourpusses personally, I cannot but think it highly unlikely that if, sitting quietly at the bar (an even sexier three inches taller as the happy result of the newly stuffed wallet beneath them) these hunks were to be lurchingly approached by a shrieking woman with each mottled eye rolling differentially in her head, above a mouth errantly lipglossed onto her chin and a lava lamp riveted to her tattooed navel, Brad or Vinnie or George would without a second thought fall into her flailing arms simply on the strength of their sharing a fancy for the same tipple.

  Nevertheless, I shall go with the flow; and since what is flowing seems to have become unacceptable to the Committee of Advertising Practice, I happily lay before them the tempting stall of my CV and my snapshot. And I do so not solely for the enormous personal gain that their desperate industry will be compelled to front up for the right wrinkly, I also offer myself in the role of caring public altruist, eager to do the state some service. For if these hapless women can be convinced that the only result of sinking a couple of dozen Bacardi breezers and a kegful of pina colada would be to end up with a bald old git whose long-gone best years were spent as a hysterical thunderbox and a talking pile, they might very well sign the pledge tomorrow.

  Any day now, I could be seen as the curse of the drinking lasses.

  The Rest Is History

  OFSTED’S chief inspector of schools, says not only that the history curriculum places far too much emphasis on the Tudors and World War Two, but also that students are unable to remember key dates or major events. If the end-of-term answer paper which just happened to blow into my hands on a capricious Christmas Eve gust is anything to go by, he is not wrong.