69 for 1

by Alan Coren

  I would have shouted it in order to see what Dr Penelope Leach, president of the NCMA, made of it. She is a woman whose dedicated work I have not only long admired, but often relied upon: Mrs Coren and I bought her seminal Your Baby and Child when it came out in 1977, and frequently threw it at our two when they wouldn’t shut up. Now she has come up with yet another set of mouldbreaking assertions; but, despite my continuing respect, at the core of her meticulously researched and convincingly argued case there is a major flaw which I would have taken a shy at this morning, if she and her acolytes hadn’t all gone home.

  The flaw was succinctly adumbrated by the headline in Monday’s Daily Mail encapsulating as only the Daily Mail can Dr Leach’s pre-released text for the conference: ‘Children Do Best If Mother Is There.’ Mail readers would have relished that: deployed around Warminster-on-Sea, straining through their binoculars for the first ripples of anything attempting to wade ashore to claim council houses and new hips, they must, the moment the paper was delivered to their hides, have buckled the welkin with their cheers.

  Not me: I am not bothered by the socio-political resonances of Dr Leach’s latest conclusion that maternal care is better than nannying, I am bothered only by the notion of better. What is a better child? Better for what? Mrs Shaw was a lousy mother. Mrs Hitler was exemplary. Put another way, were you to wish to found a great city which would develop not only into a mighty empire but also an illustrious culture blessed with immortal literature, an exemplary legal system, extraordinary art and architecture, and 307 different sorts of pasta, your best bet would be to be brought up by a wolf.

  I cannot, of course, speak for myself, except to say that during my formative years I was never allowed to, my mother being a lovably strict woman for whose husband World War Two came not a moment too soon (though family rumours that he was the only member of the RAF to attempt to tunnel into Colditz are fairly wide of the mark). She did, mind, exercise her will when my own wife was pregnant: our cat used to sit on my Mrs Coren’s lap, treadling her maternity smock, until my father’s Mrs Coren hit it with a dish-cloth on the grounds that if it did not get off, our child would be born with feline lineaments. That he was not is a source of some gratitude to him, since a food critic walking into a flash restaurant with a ginger tail hanging out of his trousers would be less than welcome, especially if he asked for mouse au vin.

  Oh, you know what I’m saying, Dr Leach: though you have spent your life researching comparative routes to the optimum nurturing of happiness, you and I both know that the truly scientific conclusion is that it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. And anyway, as Shaw further remarked, in Man and Superman: ‘A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it.’

  Olympic Standards

  ‘YOU’RE up early,’ I said.

  ‘When you are on a secret training run,’ he said, ‘you do not want people about. I have been attempting to smash the Heathrow/Hyde Park record.’

  ‘How did it go?’ I enquired.

  ‘I got it up to 3 hours 27 minutes,’ said the cabbie, through the slot. ‘In sporting jargon, £171.40. But these are early days; I could well knock on ten more by going through Hounslow twice and sticking to alleys. I see the main threat as coming from the Germans, they are competitive sods, I’ve had ’em sat there with a map and compass before now. Where to, guv?’

  ‘Wapping,’ I said.

  ‘There’s roadworks at King’s Cross,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to go via Norwich.’

  ‘Drop me off at the nearest Tube,’ I said.

  ‘No doubt,’ said the Editor, ‘you are expecting the team to concentrate on our usual two main events, the three-day SEX SCANDAL ROCKS OLYMPIC VILLAGE and the five-day DRUGS SCANDAL ROCKS OLYMPIC VILLAGE?’

  ‘More yet, sir,’ I said. ‘I should also like to put myself down for the synchronised BRIBES SCANDAL ROCKS OLYMPIC VILLAGE. I feel ready.’

  The Editor offered me his warmest smile. Frost formed on my stubble.

  ‘The game has changed, old timer,’ he said. ‘For the 2012 Olympics, all our efforts will be bent towards achieving supremacy in one event only: the MILLIONAIRE DISCUS. This great newspaper is going to make someone the first discus millionaire. Every day, a little cardboard disc will be tucked inside the Business Section. Each – here is the brilliant part – will have a different number on it.’

  ‘Fabulous,’ I murmured. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘You can go and find a young British hopeful to interview,’ he said.

  ‘This news has come as a wonderful boost for Sharon!’ barked her mother into my tape recorder. ‘Only 12, but already showing every sign of the form that will take her right to the top, thanks to one of that unsung band of British mums dedicated to seeing that Rumania does not have things all its own way in 2012! Yes, the lights snap on every day at 4 a.m. behind the neat curtains of the spotless Chigwell semi with its own off-street parking and wealth of shrubs, as Doreen, 38 but with the figure of a woman half her age, ensures that Sharon goes through those rigorous exercises which will develop her lithe young body into a finely-tuned instrument in time for that fateful day seven years from now when it will be Olympic Week In the Sun. Sharon will be competing with the world’s top stunnas for the coveted Page Three spot, leading to fab modelling contracts, and her own chat show.’

  ‘Plus a champagne-style penthouse for the best Mum in the world,’ said Sharon, to the carpet.

  There was a pub opposite. I ordered a pint.

  ‘You want to get sunnink hot inside you,’ said the landlord, ‘day like this. Do you a nice Athlete’s Lunch: jumbo piece of Olympic Cheddar, two onions as supplied to the British relay team, slice of the only wholemeal wossname Kelly Holmes would touch, and a dollop of fencer’s mustard, twelve quid.’

  ‘Seems a bit steep.’

  ‘It’ll be fifteen tomorrow. You would not credit the anticipated demand. We are less than 12 miles from Wembley Stadium. I am going for gold.’

  ‘But the Games are five years off,’ I said.

  ‘I might be dead in five years,’ said the landlord.

  ‘This could be his last Olympic chance,’ cried a potman from the cellar.

  Outside the pub, I found my way barred by a policemen’s arm. A mob was running by, sweating and spitting.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘A charity jog? A terror attack? An Ikea sale?’

  ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Could be hotdog sellers, travel agents, guides, ticket touts, publishers, pickpockets, you name it. They could be rushing to audition for Celebrity Love Pole Vault, Strictly Come Shotputting, narmean?’

  ‘Dear God!’ I cried. ‘Is this going to go on for another five years?’

  ‘There’s a sporting chance,’ he said.

  A Star Is Born

  YOU cannot see me this morning, but I am hugging myself. That is because, on another morning in the not too distant future, you may very well be able to see me hugging myself. My television career is about to take off. Quite literally, thanks to Merseyside Police.

  For this is the morning on which they launch their CCTV drone. I do not know how it came to be called a drone, but your Johnny Etymology is a funny cove, so leave us not waste time wondering how a bee with its feet up suddenly transmogrifies into the busiest bee of all, and instead rejoice that the skies above us will soon be buzzing with hundreds of titchy airborne cameras, scoping our every move. Because you may be sure that, when it comes to surveillance, it will be today Merseyside, tomorrow the world.

  So I hug myself because, hitherto, my CCTV career has been embarrassingly sluggish. It has had its moments, but they were rare: true, I am something of a star in my local Waitrose, where security staff say it is always a joy watching me grin up at them as I reach for catsmeat or wonder animatedly whether I will get my trolley through a particularly tricky gap in Special Offer pyramids, scratching my head, rolling my eyes, giving it large, they say I am one of a kind; and the man in my off-licence, I know, never tires of me juggling lagers, e
ven funnier, he says, now he’s had colour put in, most customers just stand quietly in the queue, Mr Coren, you are a real tonic.

  But, even when you take into account my handful of impromptu comedy classics – Overfilling Tank And Petrol Running All Down Trousers, say, or Forgetting Pin Number At Lloyds Cashpoint And Man Behind Shouting, or even my more rehearsed performances, such as Pulling Margaret Beckett Face In Betting Shop – these are all minor gems, and have never drawn audiences larger than three. Four, if you count the myopic punter staring at the wrong screen for the 3.15 from Sandown Park.

  I have never, you see, been lucky enough to be in a corner grocery when shotguns were deployed in time for nationwide exposure on News at Ten, I have never been visibly passed on Euston Station by a mobiling hoodie subsequently arrested for phoning Bin Laden, I have never been anywhere near when a congestion-charge camera spotted, say, Pete Doherty rooting about in a litter-bin, or an Ivy washroom lens caught Joan Collins tackling a zit. I wasn’t around. In CCTV business, timing is everything.

  Or, rather, has been up until now. From today, thanks to the Old Mersey Bill, and from tomorrow, thanks to the world we now live in, CCTV will be everywhere. All I have to do to go big-time is get out and about a lot. Eventually, something major is bound to happen where I am, and when it does, you will see me that very night, just behind Natasha Kaplinsky’s ear. I shall be the one doing handstands.

  Just A Tick

  AS I write, I have absolutely no idea what time it is. This is something of an inconvenience when you are working against a deadline. Suddenly, the deadline is working against you. You will say, how strange, he is a man of the world, he has knocked about a bit, why hasn’t he got a watch? I will answer, good question, there are no flies on you, but the truth is I do have a watch. It is on the other side of the room, under a cushion on the chesterfield I use to stare at the ceiling when I am unable to think of anything with which to meet my deadline. It is not only under a cushion, it is also under the sweater I have put over the cushion. The only way I can find out the time is to get up from the screen at which I am tapping this, cross the room, take the sweater off the cushion and the cushion off the watch, look at it, and then put it back under all the stuff I took off it to check what time it was. This takes a lot of time you cannot spare when you have a deadline.

  Especially because, willy-nilly, a neurotic factor has now introduced itself into the equation: I have become unable to not think about the time, and am thus in a constant battle with the temptation to get up and run across the room to do the thing with the watch and the cushion and the sweater. Each time I do this, of course, the time employed in doing it chips off a bit more of the time between me and the deadline. I rather think it was Richard II who put his finger bang on my button when he muttered: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,’ but I cannot check up on his exact words because that would mean getting up and running over to the bookshelf, and if I did that I should be incapable, as I passed the chesterfield on the way back, of not lifting up the sweater and the cushion and looking at the watch again.

  You, who if I do not stop all this will soon be as nuts as I am, are entitled to an answer to your second question, which is ‘Why is his watch not on his wrist?’ Join me at Nice airport, yesterday at 6.11 p.m. GMT, a trip you may easily make, whatever Einstein said – you wouldn’t believe how little he thought about time, compared with me – and you will see me pulling the bezel out of the side of my watch, because the hands stand at 7.11 French time, and I am soon to board a plane back to England, and I not only like to be ready – I have this thing about time, you know – I also like to have something to do at airports when I am waiting to get on a plane which is an hour late and I have finished my book. So I pulled out the bezel to turn back the hands, but what happened was, the bezel kept on coming until it was totally out. ‘My bezel has come out,’ I told Mrs Coren, in some distress, but she had not finished her book, so could not have been expected to look up and be the helpmeet for me, despite what God promised.

  So I got up and walked across the departure lounge to a shop called Ferret, which sells duty-free watches, and I put my watch on the counter, and the Ferretwoman did one of those eye-rolling-mouth-pursing-tongue-clicking shrugs which the French learn in the womb and said that my watch was up the Swanee, albeit in French. Then, for hers is a race ever on the qui vive to help the afflicted, she offered to sell me a Rolex, an Omega, a Longines, or other fine item much sought after by people wishing to have their forearms chopped off while waiting to cross a Harlesden zebra, but eventually settled (slightly grudgingly, I sensed) for the cheapest of her stock, a black plastic Swatch hardly larger than a dinner-plate; so I gave her 40 euros, and hurried back to show it to Mrs Coren, who I’m sure might have brought herself to look up from her Trollope, had my happy cries been audible above the din. For Nice, as I would learn to my cost, is a very noisy airport indeed.

  That cost presented itself, an hour later, at 30,000 feet, the height at which the plane, having depowered to cruising mode, went quiet. And Mrs Coren went pale. ‘Something’s ticking,’ she said. I cocked an ear. She wasn’t wrong. Somehow, something with an almighty rhythmic clunk had succeeded in getting itself aboard the plane, with the object of blowing us out of it. It was only as I reached up with my trembling left hand to press the steward’s button that I clocked what it was. I had bought a watch which mice would want to run up; if it had a chime (I had owned it for only half-an-hour, and didn’t know what else might sit in the huge Swatch works beneath the plate), 80 passengers would turn round, expecting News At Ten.

  I didn’t get much sleep last night. Though I put the watch on a far table, not only did its tick rattle the windows, but its luminous hands so set the wallpaper aglow as to leave me lying there thinking that if Saddam were to start building watches like this, Clare Short would volunteer for Tornado duty. Do you blame me for keeping it under a cushion under a sweater?

  Gift Horses

  OH, come on, for pity’s sake: pity the Prince of Wales, it is the least you can do: not only do you know that the public enquiry into the whereabouts of all the gifts presented to him over the years could not have come at a worse time, you know he knows it, too, because he has a snazzy monogrammed Rolex with the date on it. Indeed, he has a dozen of them, somewhere, each snazzier than the last – though not, perhaps, as snazzy as the two hundred he used to have, before they all went walkabout – so it can hardly have escaped him that there remain very few shopping days to Christmas. We should therefore not be at all surprised if, even as he crawls around on all fours this morning, he finds himelf muttering, like an earlier melancholy prince, ‘The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!’

  The all fours, of course, are not strictly speaking his. He does not crawl around on his own all fours, any more than he squirts his own toothpaste onto his own toothbrush or holds his own jam-jar for his own widdle; he has people who crawl around for him on their all fours. There will be several of them up in the royal loft right now, crawling fit to bust, seeking the bits and bobs that, with any luck, might have fallen behind the tanks or between the joists, groping under this and that, getting filthy, getting splinters, while he stands in the middle with his enormous hand-tooled gilt-edged crested clipboard, ticking things off. The first thing he ticked off, by the way, was the clipboard. It was a present from the Akond of Swat. Fortunately, it was for his birthday, only last Thursday; that is why he has still got it.

  He has not, as the harrowing cries from the four far corners of the huge loft keep informing him, got much else. He has, for example, just discovered that he has no longer got either the life-size clockwork moose presented to him by the Saskatchewan Rotary Club to celebrate his first tooth, or the solid gold cricket bat given to him by the Sultan of Brunei on the occasion of his woodwork O-level. Coming, as these two grievous buffets did, hard upon the news that his graduation ermine duvet and matching bathmat from US Ambassador Annenberg was no less
missing than the 266-piece Limoges mah jong set gifted by Emperor Bokassu for Chanukkah 1983, they have not surprisingly cast the stricken heir into even glummer depths.

  The fact that the Keeper of the Loose Floorboard now lopes across the loft to inform the Prince that the return on three of these items was £768.20, less 40 per cent commission to the Highgrove window-cleaner, is scant consolation; especially as, pressed sotto voce, Floorboard is compelled to inform the Prince that the fourth, unsold, item is currently in the possession of a former Miss South Uzeira, whom Prince Andrew once invited up to the loft to inspect his etchings: determined not to leave empty-handed after terminally holing her sateen basque on the outstretched finger of an alabaster cherub presented to the Duke of Edinburgh by the 2 Para sergeants’ mess, she might well turn nasty, murmurs Floorboard, should Sir Michael Peat apply for a warrant to search her dressing-room at the Stoke-on-Trent Peppermint Rhino. Glancing at his clipboard, however, HRH is unable to identify the etchings in question; upon fraught enquiry, he is told that they were a complete series of Piranesi’s Vedute, first examples off the plate and signed by the artist, and had recently raised almost £90, which Prince Andrew had said was bloody fantastic, considering they weren’t even in colour.