by Alan Coren
Later, maybe. First I have to forget that four-legged ear: come 2009, it’s only hair I want to see sprouting from the top of of my head.
Einstein Gets The Bird
A MAN goes into a doctor’s surgery. His face is painted bright blue, he has a banana in one ear and a gherkin in the other, a pink chrysanthemum sticking out of each nostril, and a parrot on his head. The doctor says: ‘Good morning, what appears to be the trouble?’ and the parrot replies: ‘How do I get this thing off my feet?’
Yes, you are not wrong, it is an old joke. The important question is: how old? If any senior reader heard it more than 50 years ago, it would make me immensely grateful if he or she would write to tell me so, because should the joke have been in existence on March 14, 1954, it is quite possible that Albert Einstein, whose 75th birthday that was, told it to his birthday present. He would have done this in order to cheer his birthday present up. We do not know why his birthday present was unhappy – among other things, it is quite possible that it had not wanted to be given to Albert Einstein, and many of us might sympathise with that – we know only that Einstein’s last girlfriend, Johanna Fantova, recorded the fact in her diary, which recently came to light when somebody opened a Princeton cupboard. Jotted in spidery longhand German, the text revealed that Einstein’s 75th birthday present was a parrot, which he christened Bibo. He then observed it for a time, and came to the conclusion that the bird was depressed.
Now, some of you who have knocked about a bit might be tempted to the conclusion that what depressed the birthday present was not just that it had been given to Albert Einstein, but that Albert Einstein had called it Bibo, because you know that a parrot has no lips, and thus cannot do plosives. Bibo could not pronounce his new name. Albert would come in of a morning, whip back the cover, tap the cage, and say: ‘Hello, Bibo, who’s a pretty boy, then?’, hoping that Bibo would reply ‘Bibo.’ Bibo could not; had he tried, anything struggling through his beak would have come out ‘Gigo’. Guessing that if that happened, the smartest man in the world might conclude that he had been given the dumbest parrot in the world, Bibo said nothing. He just looked glum. I think we can all understand that.
Einstein, however, apparently couldn’t. He may have been the smartest man in the world when it came to relativity, clock paradox, black holes, quantum mechanics, operationalism, or anything else on the long list I have just looked up in The Big Boy’s Book of Science Stuff, but when it came to parrots, he was thicker than two short Plancks – a joke which seemed to me to be lying around there somewhere, even though I have not the faintest idea what it might mean. And that is the point: what Einstein did to cheer up the parrot to whom he’d given a name he didn’t have the nous to realise the parrot couldn’t say, was to tell it jokes the parrot couldn’t comprehend.
Because what Einstein demonstrably failed to grasp was that the whole parrot/human thing works only when the parrot says words it doesn’t understand but that the human being laughs at: a depressed human being may well be cheered up if a parrot shouts: ‘Half a gound of tuggeny rice!’ over and over again, but a depressed parrot will not be cheered up if a human being tells it the one about a man with a blue face going into a doctor’s surgery.
I really don’t know what Einstein thought he was playing at. Now, while I should be the first to admit that it is also undeniable that I really don’t know what he thought he was playing at when he was playing at the unified field theory and all that other stuff, in the matter of the relativity between men and parrots, I feel fully qualified to have a go at him. More yet, I feel a columnar incumbency to have that go: for we live, as I think you may have spotted, in somewhat precarious times, not only because Albert’s conclusion that E=mc2 will any day now empower some sick dupe with a bulging tote-bag to flatten Manchester, but also because of the exponential burgeoning of scientists excitedly hurling their brains at everything from breeding fatherless mice and insisting that they stick to a low-cholesterol diet and lay off Old Navy Shag, to shredding the ozone layer with spaceships designed to land on Betelgeuse in an attempt to contact beings who may have invented a better moustrap; but while they are all, I’m sure, not only extremely bright but also wonderful to their mothers, they may well be unnervingly short of the common sense that persuades the rest of us to think twice before telling jokes to parrots.
Child’s Play
IT’S no fun being a kid, these days. I know this because, as a million kids this morning hand in homework essays on what they did on Bank Holiday, one is explaining that his blew out of the window. I found it.
Today I went for a ride on my new bycicle. My dad bort it becaus my boddy-mass index was .002 per cent too high on Friday, and my Mum started screeming yu hav eeten a toffy, nigel, who gave yu the toffy, i cannot let yu out of my site for a second, what did he look like, did he tuch yu, if so wear? Nobody gave me a toffy i replide, my increesed wate is probly on acount of particulates falling out of the sky onto me wile i was in the gardn, or a grothe inside me due to passiv smoaking from Mr Foskett acros the rode, last thersday my windo was open and so was his, or maybe some hewy fleas jumped on me off of a nurban fox. At this, my dad stagger and grab the fridge for suport, seting off the alarm (yu are not alowed to tuch the fridge between meels), i hav told yu not to go into the gardn unacompnied, he cri, ilegal imgrants mite hav cut the razer-wire in the nite, yu culd end up in tieland as a yunuk slave or in a nafgan traning camp or in irak with boms tied round yu.
It is a nise bycicle. It is bolted to the flore in our sellar and there is a screen in front of it showing a video of Hamsted High Street, it is just like being their exept i wuld not have ecg wires stuk to me monitring my hart. I wear a helmet in case my seet belt snaps and i slip off, or somthing drops on me off of the seeling, my mum says yu never kno wear a spiders feet hav been, also it culd be poisonus, even waitrows cannot be sure they hav not cum into this cuntry on a norganic banana.
It is okay in the sellar, there is no windo for jerms, diesl funes, pollen, dedly wosps, chernobil stuff or terrists to get in thruogh, and there is a fone in case the blud pressure machine on my arm shows more than 100 over 60. It is not a sellphone of corse, because i am not alowed to hav brane canser, and it does not take incumming calls due to hewy breething. After i peddled 10 kilometers as recomended by the departmant of helth, i foned my mum and she unlokked the door and chekked my pulse and gave me my snak. It was a hoam-made spinich lolly with 8 calries.
i was alowed into the gardn after that, becaus it was time for my swim, i say swim, it is more of a paddel, because my dad puts only two sentimeters of water in the pool, after he has boyled the impuritys away, and even then i hav to wear a mask and snorkle, i do not mind because it wuld be hard to swim with the chane on anyway. The chane is fixed to a concreat blok, in case my father hav to run into the hous for any reason and leeve me aloan. i also hav to carry an umbrella wen i paddel, due to pidgen droppings, you can get ashthma and go blind and fail gese.
After lunch (lettice patties and non-bacterial yogurt, 31 calries) my best frend james from next dore came round. After sining my dad’s clipboard and showing him the noat from there solister, his parents wated until my dad had body-searched him in their presents and put him thruogh our scanner, and then james and me went to play french crickit. It is quite a dangeruos game, one of yu has a batt made of biodegradable carboard and the other one thros a sponge at his iegs. if it hits his legs, he is out. He is then examined for dammidge by a same-sex parent in the presents of a qualfied witniss (today it was Mr Simson JP MBE from no. 64), and it is his tern to be in. This does not mean he has wun, yu are not alowed to win or loose, exitement can releese fatty asids into the sistem, you get an emblism and fail gese.
Then we climed into into my tree-hous and had tee. It is easy to clime into becaus it is on the ground, as reqired by Helth & Safety Exective Para 3317, but yu can see the tree thruogh the window, if you put on dark goggles and sunscreen factor 800. Tee was a norganic collieflour chees without chees, d
ue to clesterol clogging your vanes, then we went inside and watched tee vee. A bit dull, due to wear it was switched off on account of posible vilence cumming on, also rays cumming out and giving yu sindromes.
Then james said culd we go to the park, and my mum fainted, and dad said it was time james went hoam, and he e-mailed his parents and they drove round from next dore in the 4wd to pik him up, so i had to play subutio on my own, but my mum sed yu cant be spers as wel as chelsey, all that flikking will give yuor forfinger reptive strane injry, yu will not be abel to text for help if a man gives yu sweets, so i went upstares and rote this hoamwork.
Victory Role
YOU cannot comprehend the awesome power which lies, this very second, in my right forefinger. Even though it is not moving: it is my left forefinger which is tapping this. Its right-hand buddy is poised, motionless save for an unavoidable tremor, over the telephone keypad beside my screen. Were it to tap just eight digits, the uncontrollable consequences could be momentous: the finger could make Mr Cresswell from Number 6 a superstar and it could make Lord Montagu jump for joy, but it could also make my parents turn in their graves. That is the power which lies in my right forefinger. It is, truly, the Fickle Finger of Fate: all it has to do is tap 8233 6539.
Even without being dialled, does that number ring a bell? It is the number for James Rowat, of ITV, who is ‘seeking colour home movie footage of VE-Day to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe. VE-Day in Colour will construct a picture of May 8, 1945.’ Readers, I have that footage: it is in the cupboard behind me, right now, a dozen feet away, on a tin reel, 18 minutes-worth of it, spliced together from four titchier reels by my Uncle Syd, who shot it on an 8mm Kodak in the front garden of Number 12, Oakdale; whither – were I to let my fingers do the walking – millions of gawping eyes could soon be tellyported.
Where the first thing they would see would be Mr Cresswell from Number 6 silently hopping on one leg around the rockery with a pint of Guinness on his head. The second thing they would see would be Mr Cresswell from Number 6 coming back around the rockery the other way, pintless this time and walking on his hands. For Uncle Syd was an inspired splicer: he knew how to strike a keynote. Nothing could better announce that the war was over than those two joyful journeys of Mr Cresswell from Number 6.
The scene now shifts to the porch, where a man younger than my son, in RAF blue serge, is kissing a woman younger than my daughter, in a floral frock. The small thing beside them holding a scroll is their son. After several seconds’ prompting by a disembodied directorial hand, the son unrolls the scroll so that Cecil B. de Syd can wobble his camera closer and reveal that I have been given the scroll by King George VI for helping him defeat Hitler. I still have the scroll; it will come in useful if Giles ever climbs onto my knee to ask his daddy what he did in the war.
Now, ITV viewers, should the finger ever give them the chance, may feel that the sudden lurching pan from the king’s scroll to the milkman’s horse is a bit brusque; but the timing of United Dairies was ever a law unto itself, and there was no way an auteur as spry as Uncle Syd was going to pass up the telling chronography of the little union flag stuck to each of the horse’s blinkers, nor the larger one on its backside as it trundled on from our front gate to Number 14’s – and what a bonus lies fortuitously in the background of that wonky arc! A veritable bonsai Beaulieu: my father’s maroon Riley Merlin, Syd’s blue Wolseley Hornet, a couple of unattributable black Morris 8s, and the great green Humber Vogue outside Number 18, with Mr Paige, forever panting and forever young, buffing it to a gleam which flashes the sun back into Syd’s unhooded lens, for all the world like one of the suddenly superannuated searchlights on the green at the top of our road.
Why, then, should my right forefinger still hover? Is this not only exactly the kind of stuff ITV is after, demotic history, unsung heroes, old frocks, old cars, old manners and mores, pebble-dash walls and sunburst gates and funny haircuts, a yesteryear feelgood factor resurrected to cheer these feelcrap times, but also, for me and my forefinger, a chance to stick one on Old Father Time and immortalise the dear departed?
Yes, it is; and that is the problem. For, as the film clacks on through the sprockets, so the day wanes and wearies: oh, look, here is Mr Cresswell from Number 6, face down in the rockery now, with Mrs Cresswell shouting at him, here is the milkman’s horse coming back up Oakdale and doing something Uncle Syd found irresistible, here is an uncannily silent hokey-cokey showing what happens to nice suburban ladies after one bottled Bass too many, here is my father up to something extremely silly with a couple of oranges . . .
Here, in short, is unedited immortality, and it is owed a debt. I typed that sentence, you should know, with my right forefinger. It is back, like the film in the cupboard, where it belongs.
Almost a Gentleman
YOU would not, 1500 years ago today, have found me pecking spasmodically at the dawn keyboard.
You would – but only if you had been minded to abseil riskily from a rampart and squint through a loophole – have found me having a net: that is, rehearsing a few top swishes at a big wooden dragon with my burnished broadsword, the gelid flagstones of my bedchamber ringing to the twinkling sabatons upon my knightly feet, my sturdy calves flexing beneath their smart crested greaves, a poleyn hingeing on each noble knee with the silent slickness that only goose grease can confer, and a bright cuisse flashing on each sinewy thigh; while, downstairs, my loyal squire sat devotedly buffing tasset and pauldron and vambrace, and anything else he could identify from his master’s trusty thesaurus.
Or possibly not. The sixth-century class structure being, as I understand it, a tad less flexible than today’s, the odds are minimal that King Arthur would have fancied me for knighthood and derring-do: the closest I should have come to any Round Table tuck-in would have been circling it with my forelock in one hand and the pudding platter in the other, and God help me if a blob of custard fell on Launcelot’s coulter. Or perhaps, given my present trade, somersaulting in the grate with titchy brass bells tinkling on my hat, and telling my yawning liege lords the one about the Roman, the Dane, and the Jute.
However, they have not twigged this in Charleston, South Carolina. Not only do they not realise I am not a gentleman, they firmly believe I am up for knighthood. The they concerned are the Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, and they have just written to me – on something impressively vellumoid – to say that, after long deliberation, I have been selected as a fit candidate for ennoblement to their distinguished ranks. They do not say how they came to do this deliberating, but my guess is that since, down the long arches of the years, I have somehow managed to have been made both an Honorary Colonel in the Confederate Army and an Ensign of the Tennessee Volunteers Overseas, I have somehow, willy-nilly, wormed my way – perhaps, quite literally, as some kind of virus – on to a Dixieland computer network pledged to embarrassing Europeans of a liberal bent. It is not beyond credibility, either, that one or other of the Bush family has had a sly hand in all this.
But what is more interesting than the Chevalier’s provenance is their declared motive. They are, they tell me, pledged to the return of chivalry. Nothing new there: the dream of courtoisie persists, else man would not have so regularly given it a revitalising kick, fleeing into its beguiling arms whenever the prevailing reality grew grisly – Spenser turning to Fairielande from the mire of the Elizabethan court, Tennyson preferring idyllic Avalon to the mundane practicality of signal box and water closet, and Hollywood running away from virtually everything towards virtual Sherwoods and Camelots. Given this, you might reasonably guess that what the Charleston Chevaliers – a trifle unsettlingly, my mind’s eye sees them all in sequined flapper drag, with bobbed hair and bee-sting mouths, dancing frenetically to Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet, but I’ll get over it – want to get away from is the miasma of Iraq, but that is not the case. What they want to get away from, quite patently, is the ever-worsening threat to all they hold dear (as it were) from feminism. I know
this from their enclosed roster meticulously detailing precisely what I have to commit myself to if I wish to pass the test for knighthood.
In broad, I have to miss no opportunity ‘to make ladies feel like ladies.’ In narrow, this means I have not merely to tip my hat, open doors, pull back chairs, tote dat bag, lif dat tray, push dat trolley, squeeze dat gas-pump, and light dat fag, and of course manfully refuse any lady her offer to pick up a restaurant tab or bar check. I have also to commit myself, at all times, to telling women what pretty little things they are, what a really great job they are doing for us menfolk, and, get this, Germaine, ‘striving always to persuade them – especially those, and they are many, who appear to you to be obsessed with their so-called careers – that marriage and motherhood should be the highest aspiration of every woman in the world.’
Well, Chevaliers, thanks, you do me great honour, but I fear I am not the timber of which true knights are made. I lack the right stuff. Faced with one of your modern dragons, I would chicken out. I just couldn’t do the derring.
One Flu Over The Chicken’s Nest
THERE is a chicken out there with my name on it. I do not know what the chicken’s own name is, I do not even know where the there is, I know only that in the course of a long life’s wondering about what might one day nip that life in the bud, I had never, until now, reckoned it would be a chicken.