69 for 1

by Alan Coren

  dere snata:

  i am riting on behalf of my partnr, nicklas, 8, on acount of he wares this micky mouse wotch, and i am ashamed to be seen out wiv him, it is not sheek like yu see in mens magzines, i wuld like him to ware sunnink cool and fashnibble such as a wane roony wotch, wich he wuld do if yu brung him wun for crismas. if yu felt he woznt reddy for that, praps yu culd meet him halfway, with, frinstance, a micky roony wotch. for miself, i wuld like a DVD of teddys bare piknik, yuors, cheryl

  dear santer:

  hallo, i wuld like a tikkit for a 10-30 singals hollyday in the sun, i hav seen sunnink like that on the telly ware there is big gerls runnin about wobblin on wite beeches and splashin about in the rollin scurf and leepin up in the air doing vollyball and wen they cum down agane there is a bloak waitin to catch them and they all larf and go off holding hands for a drink with a flower in it, and i wuld like to be one of them bloaks, i wuld hav no problem catchin them provided they wasn’t too big, i keep wikkit for the under-13s and can also do 90 pressups, happy crismas, shaun

  deer satan:

  becos it is yore jobb to keep yore eer to the ground yu wil hav herd that the topp toy this cristmas is the tyco cyber shocker, a snipp at £74.99, wich is a radio-controld ball wich terns into a monstr at the tuch of a butten and runs about doin evrything yu say. i wuld like won wear yu tuch the butten and it terns into jenfer lopez. sharlot cherch wuld do at a pinch, yors, norman

  dere santa:

  i go to a progresiv school and hav been doing sex education for 3 years since i was 5 and came topp in my theory paper last turm and got a cup and a persnly sined copy of the book that wun this yeer’s Bad Sex Award, but wen it cum to the practical, the Hedd rote ‘Must try harder’ on mi report, so wot i wuld like for crismas is a large jar of Junior Viagrer, thank yu, Eric

  Chicken Run

  ‘THERE’S a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.’

  Spot on, Hamlet, the bird flu situation in a nutshell. Tragically, 130 lines later, he was dead; not, mind, from handling an iffy sparrow, nor even as the result of telling one of Yorick’s infinite Danish jests about 72 virgins, but just because the flesh is heir to a thousand natural shocks, and you never know your luck. Which, as you have anticipated, brings me to Dr John Reid.

  Quite why it should have been the Defence Secretary to whose lot it fell last Sunday to reassure us with the helpful ‘Don’t panic!’ I find it difficult to guess. But not impossible: evoking – as how could it not – the image of Corporal Jones running about like a, sorry, headless chicken, might it be that it is not Defra at all but the MoD which has hit upon a cunning plan for our protection? In short, given that Tommy Atkins is already overstretched from Basra to the Khyber Pass and thus in no position to be deployed in ack-ack batteries along our eastern seaboard, banging away at anything airborne with a runny beak, does Dr Reid envisage remustering the Home Guard?

  I think we should be told. I have things to do, columns to write, shelves to put up, roses to prune, cats to worm, and if, any minute now, someone is going to hammer on my front door, hand me a Lee Enfield, a whistle, a pair of binoculars, and a travel pass to Warminster-on-Sea, I need to put my affairs in order. There is also the question of my rank to be addressed: I do not intend, at my age, to be squarebashed up and down the shingle in blistering war-surplus boots by some stupid boy. I want nothing less than a colonelcy, a Sam Browne belt, a camouflaged Hillman Minx with a fit ATS cracker at the wheel, and, in the event of successfully leading my devoted men against a vastly outnumbering horde of enemy gulls coughing their way ashore at Clacton, a DSO.

  There is also Mrs Coren to be considered. She is a busy woman, and cannot be expected to start digging for victory at the drop of a hat. If the government stands poised not only to exterminate all our chickens but also – since nobody seems to know anything about anything – to raise queries about the culinary safety of sheep, cattle and pigs which may have been splattered from the skies with the infected droppings of anything my brave troops have been unable to shoot down, the nation may be forced to subsist on whatever it can grow in its back garden. This is not Mrs Coren’s thing: if Dr Reid wants her to get up and go outside with a spade and a packet of seeds, he will have to ban Sudoku first. Then again . . .

  . . . sorry to have paused in full flight, but talk of the garden reminded me that we have a wire thing hanging up for tits and I had to run out and bin it. I do not know if British tits could catch anything off French ducks – this may be a foul canard, a joke for which I apologise, but, trust me, it avoided my risking one about tits – but I cannot take that chance. It would be highly irresponsible of me to march off to war leaving peanuts hanging where they could wipe out much of north London.

  It’s only a small garden, I noticed. It had never before struck me that, once a couple of rows of victorious carrots have been sorted out, there’ll hardly be room for an Anderson shelter. Younger readers will have to look that up. Older ones will immediately understand that, when I am away doing my bit, I will be unable to rest easy in my bunk unless I know that Mrs Coren has somewhere to go where falling swans won’t get her.

  Of course, there’s always the outside chance that Uncle Sam will come to our aid. I am old enough to remember that in the Last Lot, while he was waiting to see which way the Battle of Britain went, he sent us powdered egg. It came in yellow wax-papered cartons with an eagle on them, possibly to reassure us that American birds had nothing contagious to be ashamed of. Either that, or it was powdered eagle eggs, you couldn’t tell from the taste: many diners, indeed, concluded it must be cement, graciously sent to help us shore up blitzed buildings. But generous, however you look at it, and who knows, Uncle Sam may find it in his roomy heart to help us out again. As our Defence Secretary well knows, he owes us one.

  Austen Seven

  HAVING read last weekend that ‘the Jane Austen craze has now permeated every level of the culture,’ I decided to google this observation for myself. Here is a random selection from the 794,000 entries:

  United Breweries are delighted to announce that, following extensive theme refurbishment, two of their keynote gastropubs have now reopened as The Sense & Whistle, in Notting Hill, and, in Wilmslow, Emma’s Head.

  Nine days after her husband Ronald fell into the habit of answering her every domestic question with: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that . . .’ West Byfleet dinner-lady Mrs Alice Healey, 57, shot him dead.

  Following a frustrating period in the celebrity doldrums, hilarious comedy duo Cannon & Ball have just relaunched themselves as Pride & Prejudice.

  The film world is a-buzz with the thrilling news that Working Title is soon to go into production with the screen adaptation of Jane’s Fighting Ships. The finished script has already been handed to them by the incomparable Andrew Davies, who says that while remaining true in every significant aspect to the spirit of the original book, the screenplay inevitably contains just a few small changes necessitated by the translation to the cinema. Feisty Abbey Northanger, radiant commander of the nuclear submarine HMS Persuasion, will be played by Billie Piper, Russell Brand stars as Sir Woodhouse, her dreary First Sea Lord husband, while the Chinese winkler found miraculously alive in the belly of a giant squid tragically dismembered by friendly nuking – the man for whom Cap’n Abbey irresistibly falls after he is winched dripping from the freezing Aral Sea – is to be portrayed by Colin Firth.

  Following their board’s unanimous decision, Division Two stalwarts Mansfield Town are henceforth to play as Mansfield Park. Ecstatic manager Billy Dearden told Monday’s press conference: ‘We are over the wossname. This is the result we came for.’ Asked whether the rebranding would affect their relations with arch-rivals Chesterfield, Mr Dearden declared: ‘For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?’

  Challenged 18 times by Jeremy Paxton ov
er the new caring Conservative Party policy document, ‘Sensibility’, Mr David Cameron finally admitted he hadn’t actually read it, but he was determined to take it on holiday with him.

  Rung up by one of his most senior wags to enquire whether this would do, or would even more examples be required, the Editor of Mr Rupert Murdoch’s fashionably retitled flagship, The Prejudice, told Mr Coren: ‘You have delighted us long enough.’

  Any God Will Do

  FOLLOWING reports that the threatened dismemberment of the Church of England over the issue of homosexual prelates is apparently persuading hordes of disaffected Anglicans to up sticks and defect to Roman Catholicism, fretting thousands of you have, not surprisingly, written to ask me for my expert guidance in this perplexing matter.

  ‘All right,’ you tell me, ‘we have seen the writing on the wall, any minute now we will find ourselves going into church of a Sunday morning and forced to listen to sermons about making our lives over, starting with the bedroom curtains, and parables involving Shirley Bassey or Judy Garland, also singing ‘Abide With Me’ to the tune of ‘Candle in the Wind’; not for us, thank you, but we do not want to become Roman Catholics either, all that confession stuff, you never know who’s behind the grille, it could well be some undercover ratbag from the Daily Mirror, plus incense all over your best suit and wafers not being allowed on the Atkins diet, and never certain where you are when it comes to how’s your father, or should I say how’s your Father, ha-ha-ha, so are there any other religions you can suggest which might do it for me? I am not what you’d call religious exactly, but it’s always useful to have something to put on the form when applying for a road fund licence and so forth.’

  A very tricky one this, since I clearly do not have the space here to go into any great detail, but knowing the British people as I do, I think I may at least be able to come up with a few helpful pointers for those in what we major theologians call doubt.

  Judaism, for example, has considerable appeal. The soup is good, and you can keep your hat on indoors, thereby making a considerable saving on fuel costs. Also, since you will not be allowed to drive on Saturdays, your car will last about 14 per cent longer than gentile ones. Furthermore, books are read back to front, which means that you do not have to plough through the whole of the new Jeffrey Archer to find out what happens.

  Islam, however, may suit you even better, in that if you don’t want to read the new Jeffrey Archer at all, you can not only publicly burn it, you can apply to have him shot. The main drawback with Islam is that you will have to take your shoes off upon entering the mosque. If it is a big mosque, it may take you all day to find them again.

  Buddhism is terrific if you are bald. Nobody will ever know. You can also spend all day walking up and down Oxford Street without ever having to buy anything, and with no socks to wash when you get home. Moreover, the principle of reincarnation is immensely attractive: you could come back as Bill Gates or George Clooney. But then again, you could come back as Jeffrey Archer.

  Sikhism, on the other hand, is terrific if you are not bald. Being prohibited from cutting your hair or shaving means that you will never have to visit a barber. You will thus never have to sit in a chair while someone asks you if have read the latest Jeffrey Archer yet, and – whatever your answer – spends the next fifteen minutes retelling it.

  Taking on Hinduism, though, would involve you in a somewhat more complex decision process, fraught as the religion is with a multitude of pros and cons. To take only one example, while you do not have to find your own wife, which saves you a fortune in flowers, perfume, and chocolates, you have to keep the shop open until midnight, all week, because you never know when a non-Hindu in search of a wife might want to buy flowers, perfume, or chocolates. You may also have to stock the new Jeffrey Archer: since this will almost certainly be on a sale or return basis, with mobs of customers coming and going at an unsettling rate, the accountant in your family may well be compelled to stay up far later than his primary schoolteacher recommends.

  Shinto would be, in every sense, the simplest choice. You get to fold your own house for no more than the cost of the old newspapers involved, you do not need to cook your food, you are never required to clap more than one hand, and the Japanese translation of the new Jeffrey Archer will be in the form of a haiku of only seventeen syllables.

  So there you have it. Good luck, ex-Anglicans, and God, whichever One you choose, bless you. But if none of the above appeals to you, remember that the Mormons are always on the lookout for new recruits. They’re a really nice crowd, with only one major drawback: you have to wear a shiny blue suit and a permanent grin and tell everybody you meet about this truly wonderful book of yours. You will thus run the constant risk of being mistaken for Jeffrey Archer.

  How Heavy Is That Doggie In The Window?

  IF you are a dog-lover, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy has a bone to pick with you: you love your dog so much that you have stopped picking bones for it. Instead, you are picking biccies and choccies and munchies and chewies, which are turning your doggies into fatties, especially as you are no longer taking them for walkies. Eighty one per cent of canine Britons, are obese. Worse yet, Christmas is coming, the dog is getting fat, and over Christmas it will be bound to get fatter still, since you love it so much that you cannot wait to stuff it with mince pies and cake and shortbread and pudding. If its party trick is to walk on its hind legs, your guests will think its party trick is to do impressions of Nicholas Soames.

  This survey has worried me, as surveys invariably do. That is what surveys are for. I am now worried about all pets at Christmas, and since the CSP has had nothing to say about how too much misguided love might affect any of the others, I feel I ought to be the one to step in here. I know, for example, what a dreadful mistake it would be to overfeed a stick insect: it survives by looking like a stick, but fatten it to a meaty twig, or possibly a lollipop, and its hours would be instantly numbered. Shake it out of its jar to, say, help you with your charade of The Thin Red Line, and the budgie would be on it in a trice.

  Not, of course, that the budgie should be in the room in the first place. Crackers might be pulled, and since everyone always shouts out their riddle several times over, you could well be stuck with a clever boy repeatedly shrieking: ‘How can you tell an elephant has been in the fridge?’ so far into 2007 that, in order to preserve your sanity, you will have to kill it.

  It would also be a grave mistake not to put the goldfish bowl in the loft. Christmas is a time of peculiar drinks – advokaat, kummel, chartreuse, mulled lambrusco – which may not be to everyone’s, indeed anyone’s, taste, and guests too polite to spit into the fire might easily seek the nearest covert receptacle. There is, I promise, little that breaks up a jolly Christmas party more effectively than a child demanding to know why Goldy has turned greeny and sunk motionless into his little coral castle.

  Many of you, or at any rate your children, will have beloved gerbils and/or hamsters. So beloved, indeed, that they are encouraged to sit on shoulders, peek out of pockets, or ride hilariously around in the caboose of the Hornby Dublo train that a delighted kiddie unwrapped at dawn and set up on the living-room floor. The thing about these lovable little rodents, however, is not only that they do not always stay where they are put, but also that they are by nature highly inquisitive: they will scuttle into any appealing hole, especially if it is unfamiliar. There is, I promise, little that breaks up a jolly Christmas lunch more effectively than an elderly aunt demanding to know why her portion of stuffing appears to have four crispy legs.

  Tortoises, fortunately, are easier to keep a welfare eye on, though a weather eye must be kept open now that, thanks to global warming, the weather concerned may beguile our testudinal chums into suppressing the urge to hibernate. Though not always successfully: a pet tortoise lively enough to amble about on the carpet while balloons are being exploded or ‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God’ lustily recited may, should silence fall as drunks dro
p off, pull in its bits and bobs and itself drift into motionless kip. The risk here, of course, is that one of the drunks might suddenly wake up and fancy a meat pie. There is, I promise, little that breaks up a comfy Christmas snooze more effectively than a beloved brother-in-law looking at five thousand quids worth of bridgework all over the rug. Pet lovers will argue that I am citing a case here where no Christmas harm has come to the cherished animal, but which of us can be certain that, on feeling its shell suddenly grabbed, the tortoise would not tragically stick its head out to see what was happening?

  Hang on, I hear 23 per cent of my readership fretfully cry, what about our beloved moggies? Oh, do leave off: you of all pet lovers know that cats are canny, circumspect self-preservationists, tuned to spot trouble a mile off and keep well away. Unless, of course, they happen to live with an animal dumb enough to put a big wobbly tree up and hang bright dangly balls all over it.

  Growing Pains

  THIS was my plan for Tuesday morning: I was going to jump out of bed, run down to the Shaw Theatre on Euston Road, burst into the annual National Childminding Association conference, shout something from the floor, and, once I had got a reaction from the podium, run home again and write this.

  Well, not this. This is what I shall have to write instead, because the plan didn’t work. The Shaw Theatre was shut. The conference was over. It had lasted only a day. I don’t know why the NCMA Conference is so brief, it may be because, if all the childminders are at it, there isn’t anybody at home to look after their kids, but whatever the reason, all I have done this morning is jump out of bed, run down to Euston Road, bang on a big door, and run home again. I have not been able to take advantage of the delightful coincidence of their holding it at the Shaw Theatre; because what I had been planning to shout was: ‘Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of children.’ I wanted to shout this not just because Shaw said it when he was 90, after he had had a fair amount of time to think about it, but also because, at the distant beginning of that time, he had had a really rotten childhood, thanks to the fact that his mother was a singer with the range of a frog who selfishly pursued her unnecessary career rather than bring little George Bernard up; which – and this is the point – explains neither why he became an estate agent at 14, nor a great writer afterwards.