69 for 1

by Alan Coren

  Then again, since we are talking about two major readers here, how many of their books are duplicated? Michael might well have popped into Daunts to buy something, even while Claire was forking out for the self-same book in Hatchards. What about the books neither of them paid for? Surely review copies shouldn’t count, or signed copies brought round to dinner by friends too stingy to buy a bunch of flowers? Where do we stand on three metres of Encyclopaedia Britannica or the OED, are these four dozen books or merely one of each? Can I make myself believe the Frayns have the complete 572 Barbara Cartlands and cannot bring themselves to bin them rather than ship them to Richmond, never mind the quality, feel the width? But if they have brought themselves to do that, then how many more metres than 250 might they have binned or Oxfammed? There could have been unimaginable lengths of Blyton, Archer, football annuals, AA books, Gideon bibles; the unwinnowed Frayn collection might well have stood higher than the Empire State.

  See, the crates are sealed, the van is chugging up Gloucester Terrace; I shall never know, now. But what the hell: it is Richmond’s turn to measure and gnash.

  The Folks Who Live On The Hill

  IF you think I do not give a fig for Jude Law, you are mistaken. We are all communities, these days, and since he is my Primrose Hill neighbour, I must be there for him. That, five years ago, I went there for me is neither here nor there; nor is the observation that you would not expect a man called Jude Law to end up on Primrose Hill: you would expect a man called Jude Law to end up on Boot Hill. A man called Jude Law should be a mythic bounty hunter with a Colt on his hip and a Derringer in his hat, riding into some rickety wooden town at high noon, bent on cashing in on the head of Jesse James, only to find that Jesse has a hip and a hat of his own, and also, as a lay preacher, knows a thing or two about the quick and the dead.

  But on Primrose Hill, the real Jude Law is alive. And kicking. That is what caught the attention of the press, who gleefully reported his booting out of his fiancée Sienna, following his discovery that she was knocking off his best friend Daniel Craig. The press did it gleefully because it was only recently that they had reported Sienna’s booting out of Jude for knocking off Daisy Wright. Sienna was particularly ratty because Daisy was their nanny, but let me say in my neighbour’s defence that if Miss Wright comes along, a chap cannot pass up his chance of happiness on the meagre grounds of taste.

  So then, is this Jeu d’esprit just about spooky names? Well, yes, especially if we take into account the icy fingers of Sadie Frost, formerly Mrs Law, which sent a shiver down the spine of her busily bi-lateral neighbour Kate, the neighbourhood’s rolling Moss who, though she may not as yet have gathered any Stones, has certainly come tumbling down Primrose Hill and broken a fair few of the crowns that reign over her feckless community. (Amateur paparazzi wishing to make a bob or two with their snapping cellphones will find them holding court outside, where else, The Queens.)

  And in all this there is a yet spookier name to address. It is Primrose Hill itself. Which, when I got here, was a rather different community, one that is now, as you might guess, not entirely happy with recent changes: it had grown accustomed to preening itself for being an idyllic literary backwater – part deep, part shallow – where a blissful riparian peace, all too rare in London, was disturbed only by the plangent ping from a platen as Alan Bennett or Michael Frayn or Claire Tomalin or Martin Amis or Beryl Bainbridge or A. N. Wilson or Simon Jenkins reached the end of yet another immemorial line. The community even tolerated the odd arriviste wag, on the pitiably optimistic grounds that he might one day come to his senses and try his hand at a novel.

  What, however, took us all horribly by surprise, a short while back, was the sudden headlong anabasis from West London of film folk: not only actors and directors and producers gobbling up big houses, but, gobbling up titchy flats, best boys and gaffers and grips. Primrose was the new Notting. Bang went the hood: not because these people were in pictures – many members of the community, after all, live in hope that one day their dog-eared treatment of Northanger Abbey will be made into a film – but because they were flash, raucous, promiscuous, assortedly bent, and thus comprehensively threatened the good name of Primrose Hill.

  Well, I cannot deny that Primrose Hill is a good name. Certainly it is a better name than Greenbury Hill, which is what it was called in October 1678, when Sir Edmund Godfrey JP was found on it with a sword sticking out of him and his neck broken. Though a confidant of Charles II, the hapless Godfrey had been falsely tainted with involvement in the Popish Plot – in which the King rightly did not believe, having seen through the perjury of Titus Oates (great name, should have been a model, actor, boyband), but went along with for a quiet though merry life squeezing oranges – and, as the result, was done to death on Greenbury Hill in order to keep anti-Catholic sentiment alive. His murderer was never found, but three sad civil service pawns at Somerset House were fitted up for it. Their names? Green, Bury, and Hill. Let nobody say Protestants lack a sense of humour.

  It preferred to be called Primrose Hill, after that. So the neighbourhood hasn’t really gone downhill at all, has it? Convoluted celebrity wickedness is in its best tradition: puffed and reckless libertines have always trod the Primrose path of dalliance. I tell you, it wasn’t like this in Cricklewood.

  Poles Apart

  THE Home Office has published a phrasebook aimed at helping new immigrants to express themselves in ‘common media English’.

  Mrs L. D. Prozniwicz,

  43 Glummprospekt, LODZ

  Dear Mother:

  We deeply regret any inconvenience caused due to not writing before, but we are up to our eyes in the wrong kind of backlog. I trust you and Father are keeping well, remember 4 out of 5 so-called tension headaches are really due to constipation. I have found a nice bleeding room in Palmers Green, know what I mean? It has got brown linoleum, which I sleep on due to not being abreast of the situation of unfolding the camp bed. No excuses, the lad just could not put it together on the night. I am sick as the moon.

  As a first-time writer, Mother, but a long-time fan, could I make this point? Isn’t it about time we moved the playing-fields to make level goalposts, stopped knocking the M25, and bought back the birch? On a different note, you will be glad to learn that despite renewed pressure on the major banks and slack trading in gilts, I am eating well, thanks to a unique biological action which 8 out of 10 owners prefer. There is also a funky tin bath down the corridor, but it does not have a door on the side to step through as advertised on TV, so I do not know how to use it yet. When time is right, I may have to throw caution to winds, grasp nettle, and go in at deep end.

  A Lodz reader writes to ask if I have met any girls in England yet. Well, Mrs L. D. Prozniwicz, the bubbly stunna tipped by the tabloirazzi as the next Mrs Y. W. Prozniwicz stepped into the limelight for the first time yesterday! But stacked 19-year-old Chablisse, checkout diva at a major branch of the billion-pound agglomerate Tesco, refused to be drawn on future plans. Asked by Mr Y. W. Prozniwicz what she was doing on Saturday night, she struck him with a giant economy Whiskas, perfect for whites and coloureds alike.

  Speaking about the incident later from his cutting-edge lino suite, the victim, who is off the critical list, comfortable, as well as can be expected, and hoping to resume his playing career as soon as doctors give the thumbs-up to one of Britain’s brightest prospects for many a long year, said: ‘This violence must stop, Mr Blair, it is sending young people entirely the wrong message, I am not alone in the unshakeable conviction that unless something is done, and done soon, then nothing is going to be done about it.’

  Chablisse, however, was unrepentant. ‘No is still the best contraceptive. At the end of the day I hope to become involved in a caring one-to-one leg-over relationship to die for, and I want the future Mr Right to respect me as a person.’ We say: COME OFF IT, CHABLISSE! Think outside your box! The people of Palmers Green have been fobbed off with this kind of spin for far too long. In the final analysis
, they have earned the right to a square deal.

  As if confirmation were required, later that same evening a foxy young Pole, unable to locate the keys to his fashionable lower-ground penthouse, attempted to climb through a window but was felled by a state-of-the-art, if controversial, truncheon. Struck over the head twice in one day! Just coincidence? A cynic might say yes, but then how do you explain the Loch Ness Triangle, or what Wing Co. Johnny ‘Johnny’ Johnny, an ex-public schoolboy with three kills to his credit, heard that night over Dortmund?

  PC Dixon takes a different view. ‘I have got nothing against any of them personally, and it is contrary to procedure to smack little foreign buggers, but he could have had anything under that cap. And no, the solution is not to arm the police – if I had shot him you would not believe the paperwork. Nor is voluntary repatriation the answer: the inevitable result would be that honest coppers would find theirselves knocking English people about.’

  Well, Mother, that about wraps it up, the old clock on the wall is telling yours truly to take account of what is staring all of us in the face, that this is the bottom line. Suffice it to say it is the result we came for, your loving son, Y. W. Prozniwicz, News At Ten, Palmers Green.

  PS: If you are affected by any issues raised in this letter, such as being Polish and not able to read it, there is a helpline on 0870 888 9992.

  Rhinestones Are Forever

  ANNOUNCING that MI5 would, for the first time, be placing recruiting ads in newspapers, a spokesman said: ‘The service is open to everyone. We are not looking for anything out of the ordinary.’

  The Guardian

  Bond lifted his leg fairly athletically, for him, and buffed his left toecap behind his right shin. Then, hardly wobbling at all, he did the same with his right toecap. This made his new £59.95 brown brogues by Lilley & Skinner of Brent Cross come up very nicely. He glanced down to test whether he could see his face in them, but his gold-style Boots BOGOF spectacles had misted slightly from the stairs, so he removed them and polished them on his old school tie. A wry smile played about his lips as he reflected that if the headmaster of East Willesden Comprehensive had caught him doing it, he would not, these days, have clipped his ear. Had he tried it, Bond, who had now reached page 18 of Teach Yourself Karate, would almost certainly have been able to give him quite a serious push.

  He knocked on the mahogany door, and entered. A plump woman behind the gleaming Ikea desk was attending to a pimple. ‘The name’s Bond,’ he said. ‘Jim Bond.’ There was a hatstand in one corner, and he flicked his brown John Lewis trilby towards it.

  ‘Your hat’s gone out of the window,’ said the woman.

  ‘I’ve got another one,’ Bond quipped effortlessly, after he had recovered. ‘Can I go in now?’

  She folded her compact, got up, went through intercommunicating doors, came back a few minutes later, and nodded. Bond coolly shot his Marks & Spencers cuffs, but one stuck on his Timex. The other cufflink broke.

  ‘Ah, Bnod,’ said M. ‘Welcome to MI5. Congratulations on being one of the 1000 short, plain, and very ordinary agents we have, as you obviously saw in our recent newspaper advertisements, decided to recruit.’

  ‘Not Bnod, sir,’ said Bond. ‘Bond. B-O-N-D.’

  ‘It says Bnod on your application,’ said M, waving it.

  ‘I’ve only just started computers,’ explained Bond. ‘Two fingers. But any day now I expect to be able to do that thing where I reprogram one three seconds before it blows the Earth up. I bought a book at Dixon’s.’

  ‘Moneypenny tells me your hat’s in the street,’ said M.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Bond. ‘My mum sewed my name in it. Also “If found, please return to MI5 and oblige”.’

  M looked at him for a time. ‘It’s a pity you’re not Bnod,’ he said finally. ‘We were rather hoping you were Russian. Do you speak it?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ replied Bond. ‘But j’ai un GCSE in French, sir. M’sieu.’

  ‘Let’s go and see Q,’ said M. ‘He’ll kit you out with an MI5 hat.’

  ‘Will it have a gun in it that fires when you blow your nose?’ asked Bond. ‘Or is it the sort you throw at bars and electrocute Chinamen with?’

  ‘You’re not licensed to kill,’ said M. ‘You’re licensed to jot stuff down in your Ml5 exercise book. If attacked, you’re licensed to shout “Help!” Do not throw things or we’ll have Health & Safety all over us.’

  In the basement, Q said: ‘Hello, Bond, we’re just fitting out your car.’

  ‘With rocket launchers and a passenger ejector and retractable wings?’

  ‘No, we’re just pushing the seat forward. You’re rather shorter than we’ve been used to. What sort of dangle-dolly do you use?’

  ‘Dice would make sense,’ said Bond. ‘They would impress the better casinos, when I’m off to play chemin-de-fer with glamorous international women spies so’s I can bed them for secrets about where Mr Big is etc.’

  ‘It’ll have to be bingo,’ said M, ‘on our budget. You might run into a cleaner who’s found something in a bin. Can’t pick up hotel bills, mind.’

  ‘They could do it in the Lada,’ suggested Q. ‘One of the seats goes fairly flat. By the way, here’s your special MI5 pen.’

  ‘What does it squirt?’ enquired Bond. ‘CS gas? Nitric acid? Curare?’

  ‘Ink,’ said Q. ‘We can’t crack it. Wear a blue shirt, is my advice. And this is your special MI5 disposable cigarette lighter.’

  ‘Containing a tiny satellite phone?’

  ‘Containing fluid for 200 lights, in case you’re stuck in the dark. When it runs out, don’t just chuck it away, bring it back here and sign a chitty.’

  ‘And don’t use it for cigarettes,’ put in M, sternly. ‘Remember, smoking can harm you and those around you.’

  ‘I was rather hoping for a gold Dunhill fag-case, sir,’ said Bond, ‘that I could slip into a pocket next to my heart to deflect bullets.’

  M pressed the lift-button.

  ‘In your dreams,’ he said.

  Hair Today

  YOU will all, I know, recall the ear with four legs. How could you not? It scuttled through your worst nightmares. In many of them, indeed, it will not only have scuttled through, it will have run up the clock; and when the clock struck one, you will have jack-knifed upright, clutching your sweat-stained duvet, for it had also struck terror into your waking heart.

  That is because, though the ear was human, its four legs actually belonged to the mouse beneath it: it was both an ear with four legs, and a mouse with an ear, neither of which made for easeful sleep. It was one of the most telling images of the twentieth century, and what it was telling us was to watch out for the twenty-first one, because the four-legged ear was only the start and what the finish might be, none dared speculate. In truth, so compelling was the image that it has driven all memory of the story itself out of my head: I know it was about genetic modification, but I cannot now remember whether the object had been to create a mouse with really terrific hearing, the ear being ten times bigger than the mouse’s own titchy two, or to grow ears for people whose own had fallen off. Either way, it did not make it any less daring to speculate: genes being the retentive little johnnies they are, the successful experiment might lead (a) to a race of rodents able to hear cats and ratcatchers coming ten miles away, which could usher in a global Hamelin impervious to piping, because there would never be enough tin whistles to go round, or (b) to a race of newly eared human beings genetically endowed with the capacity to breed ten times a year, who would not merely, within a few gobbling months, overrun the planet and eat everything on it, but also make a hell of a nocturnal racket, thanks to being big and strong enough, as they frantically foraged, to send dustbin lids flying.

  And what I ask today is: where is that ear now? Is it still around? Are there others? What have its manufacturers been up to since? Geneticists do not stand still: might there be quadruped noses out there somewhere, or human livers waiting to be transpl
anted just as soon as the scientists have cracked what to do about the tail? We do not know, and I think we should be told: certainly I should, because something else murine has just happened which touches me closely, and it is extremely important for me to find out as soon as possible whether it is a good something or a bad something.

  Now, when it comes to the currently must-have genetic debate, the one about modified crops, I feel, selfishly perhaps, that I can stand safely on the sidelines and choose not to be touched by it – always provided a strong wind isn’t blowing, and the daffodils I can see this morning from my attic window do not come up, next spring, as broccoli. I can, in short, choose not to eat, drink, sniff or wear anything that has been fiddled with, since there will, with any luck, always be alternatives which haven’t. However, Dr George Cotsarelis of the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia – motivated, perhaps, not by GM ambition alone but also by the resonant incumbency of being a Greek who earns his crust in the city of brotherly love – has today announced a therapeutic breakthrough which will make millions of his fellow-men throw their hats in the air in joyous gratitude. Revealing, as they do so, exactly why they are throwing them.

  For the millions are bald, and what George has discovered is how to isolate the stem cells in the follicles of genetically modified mice that can regenerate after being planted in the scalp. Crucially, the cells were from adult mice, which normally cannot form new hair follicles, and the same holds true for humans: no new hair follicles form after we are born. Though I once had a barnet that could buckle steel combs, after the follicles packed their little bags I needed only a feather duster for perfect grooming. Which, until George broke his astounding news in yesterday’s papers, I had ruefully accepted as a given. Or, rather, as a taken.

  So what do I do now? Dr Cotsaleris admits that this treatment will not be available to human beings for five years, but since by that time my sideburns may well have fallen out too, today is not too soon to be thinking about my stance. Shall I now cleave GM to my bosom in unqualified acceptance of the wonderful boon it is? Or must I sideline all selfish considerations and hold fast to my altruistic concerns about Pandora’s box?