69 for 1

by Alan Coren

  Yours etc, Churchill

  Dear Cherchill:

  It is not my fawlt my riting is rottan, it is on acount of my diet. If yu do not get propper food yu canot constrate, also bad behaviar, we do not play hoo can widdel ferthest up the jim wall becos we want to, we do not flik blodge bullits or speke wen we are not spoke to or shuv 4a’s heds down bogs becos we like it, we cannot help ourselves due to eeting rubish. Eg, yesday we had frogsporn, and no, befor yu say it, not tapioca, Bummole had a reel tadpoal in his, he sed wot the fuk is this, and Old Farty clowted him. By the way, wot is soft underbelly? I saw yu menshunned it in Old Farty’s newspaper when he rolled it up as a weppon for Bummole’s hed. My mum says yu get it on pork, but yu hav to sleep with the butcher. I am at a loss to understand, probly due to diet againe. Well dun about D-Day, tho.

  Yours, A. Coren

  Dear Coren:

  Thank you. Yes, the war is indeed advancing rather well, and thus it may well be that this great island race will soon be facing a general election. I wonder, as a reward for her exemplary moral integrity, would your dear mother accept my personal gift of a nice York ham? I am also taking the liberty of instructing your school to put extra sultanas in the spotted dick. With more custard. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

  Most sincerely, Winston

  Private Lives

  YOU will have seen at the weekend that a Yates’s Wine Lodge in Nottingham, deeply concerned about the grim consequences of binge-drinking – riots, fights, vandalism, breakages, raids, and the myriad other appalling anti-social manifestations which, unchecked, can seriously threaten the profits of binge-drinking – and finding its own bouncers unequal to the Cerberean task, has hit on the idea of paying members of the Nottinghamshire Constabulary to police their premises on a private basis.

  Not surprisingly, especially in a city whose law so recently had its knuckles rapped for being on the ends of unacceptably short arms, a public furore has followed. Among the outraged civic clamour, however, you will not hear my voice, but this has nothing to do with my living miles from the Nottingham earshot; what it has everything to do with is my conviction that it is time this benighted country introduced a system by which rich people in need of law and order could go privately.

  Because it is self-evident that the more property you have, the more you will lose to villains eager to nick it off you; ergo, the broader should be your rights when endeavouring to thwart them. It is preposterous that a multimillionaire whose drum has just been turned over should have to stand in line for a 999 visit, a CID investigation, the minimal chance of an arrest and the remoter one of a conviction, as if he were of no more significance than some decrepit old biddy who had been mugged for her derisorily titchy pension.

  More even than this, the well-heeled should not have to wait for the crime to be committed to enjoy the full protection the bank-balance allows: they should be able to ring a special number whenever, say, they intend visiting a cashpoint, or walking to the pillar box with an important letter, or going out for the evening wearing a diamond choker/platinum Rolex/other fine bling, and having to park the Bentley in some dark alley; at the call, two senior and fully tooled-up policemen would arrive immediately, one to accompany them, and the other to squat in their vacated premises.

  You will say, hang on, the rich can already hire private security men to do this, but that is not the same thing at all: partly because private security men are not empowered to arrest, partly because they cannot even adequately confront, given that they are not permitted to carry weapons, but mainly because most of them have either recently come out of Parkhurst themselves, or know a gang who have. Nor would they be any use if a rich man’s cat went missing, or the people next door were pledging their troth too noisily, or there was something about the relief milkman which struck the rich man as iffy. If any such cloud were to appear on the rich man’s horizon, he should be able to ring Scotland Yard, bark a credit card number, and be moved instantly to the head of the Pending Inquiries waiting-list.

  I would go further: even when an arrest is made, it is often the case these days that an inept judge, flash lawyers, inexpert witnesses, and a thick jury will let the criminal off, accepting his defence that he found your Modigliani in a skip, or was simply performing a generous deed because your wife’s tiara appeared to be uncomfortably entangled in her hair. Clearly, this outcome is totally unacceptable: if you are in the fortunate position of being able to afford it, you should be allowed to hire your own private judge and jury, so that the man your own private policeman has arrested will be found guilty as charged, manacled as painfully as possible, and sent down for the term you have specified on your order form. Or, in really irritating cases, hanged by you personally: since there is no capital punishment, you would not of course be allowed to hang him by the neck until he was dead, but he could dangle for a bit, certainly until it put the roses in his cheeks.

  I realise that woolly liberals among you may argue that there should not be one law for the rich and another for the poor, but I think they are forgetting one little word: insurance. We are fortunate to live in a culture that with each passing day encourages more and more people to make provision for themselves, and I find it hard to believe that some benevolent company – let us, for argument’s sake, call it Direct Crime – would not, if my suggestions were adopted, spring selflessly to the nation’s aid.

  Mad About The Boy

  THIS morning, something dunked onto the doormat which dropped my jaw so far that the rest of me was catapulted back twenty-odd years to a year made odder than all the rest by an incident itself so odd that, even now, the memory of it, as I type, sends hot droplets coursing down my forehead into my eyes, blurring the words’ arrival on the screen.

  At that time, I was Editor of Punch, and my little cadre of wags and I were cobbling together a parody of The Times’s great stablemate, some would say unstablemate, the Sun. This of course required us to come up with a Page Three Stunna consonant with the spirit of the enterprise, and after some roisterous ferreting around in the dusty stacks of the Keystone Press Agency, we eventually found, among its ten million photographs, a figure that might have given the stacks their name.

  Nor was Miranda just a shape which, chronology permitting, would have put Jordan in the shade – certainly if Miss Price were sitting at Miranda’s feet with the sun behind them – but also a face: from beneath a demonstrably undeserved halo of platinum hair, cornflower eyes twinkled lasciviously above a pouting moue glossed to the size and lusciousness of a glazed doughnut. More yet: there was something else about Miranda which outflanked even all this desirability, and made it, for our purposes, utterly irresistable. Within seconds, we had whisked the snapshot across Fleet Street into our editorial bunker, gummed it to our layout, and, cackling, sped it to the printers.

  Some two weeks later, I received a Telex from the captain of a destroyer bobbing in the Persian Gulf. I shall name neither him nor his ship, given that it may well have been bobbing more than standing orders required, thanks to the fact that the crew had recently received their copy of Punch, and fallen head over heels (this being how it is with hammocks), for Miranda. One copy, however, was not enough: could I, the skipper begged, send a further few dozen, for pinning up, which he would personally subsidise?

  Well done, I hear you cry: not only did you pull off both an editorial and a commercial coup, you did your bit for the serving man. You made Jolly Jack Tar a little jollier. At a stroke. You cry this because you do not know, just as the crew of HMS Nameless did not know, what I knew – that Miranda was a bloke. Miranda was a drag queen: this was the something else which had tickled our callow editorial fancy. So I didn’t reply to the Telex. How could I? I dared neither reveal the truth, nor supply further copies of the lie (though one or two of my staff suggested I do both, on the grounds that not all the sailors love a nice girl). Instead, I tried to forget about it; and succeeded. Until jus
t now, when onto the mat fell the thing that jogged the memory.

  It was a book: Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel, by Darwin Porter, about which the publisher wants me to say something nice. Not easy. For, as I flipped its pages, I spotted the name of Clark Gable, and stayed the thumb: had he, I wondered, been in one of Hughes’s films? No: he had been in one of Hughes’s beds. Not content, as many would have been, with Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and all the rest, Howard had pulled Clark.

  I cannot be alone in thinking Ms Porter has done the world something of a disservice. Oh, sure, we are all men of that world, and, no less to the point, women of it, too, and have taken on board the twinnings of Laurence Olivier and Danny Kaye, or even, albeit with perhaps a slightly sharper gasp, Errol Flynn and Randolph Scott; but Clark Gable, seminal benchmark of so many hitherto immortally romantic films? Shall any of us ever again be able to watch Rhett Butler hurtling up that staircase without – even if for only a nanosecond – imagining not Vivien Leigh panting in his manly arms, but the barmy old aviator, while the great four-poster above awaits the passionate commingling of their two moustaches?

  Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams. I give not a fig for their private lives, but their public lives are mine. Who, after this, can begin to guess what other couplings lurk in what other woodsheds, trembling at the footfall of a coffin-chaser with a trick to turn? Jimmy Cagney and Spencer Tracy, perhaps? Lee Marvin and Karl Maiden? Yes, you are not wrong, it is a dinner-party game, now, and we shall never be free of it.

  Still, it has at least, and at last, freed me of one ancient burden. I know now that I was right, all those years ago, not to write to HMS Nameless and set her, as it were, straight.

  Me and My Shadow

  AS a colonel in the Confederate Air Force and the proud father of a pelican, I spent a somewhat fraught Bank Holiday Monday. It would, mind, have been even more fraught had the banks not been on holiday: the constant terror that a man in full dress uniform might at any minute turn up at a branch of Lloyds TSB, one hand holding a pelican’s leash and the other withdrawing all the money advanced for a book I haven’t yet written, would have distracted me from the work in hand, with unfathomable consequences. I was also fortunate that the work in hand had prevented me from joining the holiday jams lurching towards coast and garden centre: had I done that, I might well have returned to find my house owner-occupied by a family from Nuneaton, possibly Tring, whose Doberman – since they hadn’t had time to change the locks – would, as I stepped into the hall, have eaten my arm.

  Do you have, as Rolf Harris might put it, any inkling yet of what that work in hand is? I say Rolf Harris, but who knows, he could be any bearded joker with three legs and a wet palette currently whooping it up in Acapulco on purloined didgeridoo royalties, having had his original committed to a bin on the signature of three psychiatrists who had never signed any such thing.

  Yes, you have it now: the issue is identity-theft, and the work in hand was shredding. I had held off buying a shredder for some time, partly because I didn’t want to acknowledge that I now inhabited a world in which it had become necessary, partly because I didn’t want to lose any fingers, but I finally succumbed last week to the incessant television hectoring by Alistair McGowan that if anything ended up in my dustbin but grass-cuttings, then hundreds of globally-strewn cyberclones would soon be driving Ferraris and gargling Petrus and bedding celebrity ladyboys until the bailiffs stove my door in to distrain upon everything I owned and, discovering I no longer owned it, bunged me into Belmarsh.

  Monday started off prudently enough, bank statements, utilities bills, VAT-bumf, council tax demands, credit-card counterfoils and all the other dull bourgeois detritus humming into chaff through the chomping blades, but after it had gone, I realised I had barely started. There was so much of me left on paper: I could front up for the Lord’s Test only to find myself barred from the pavilion for impersonating me, I could be told by the chemist that my prescription had already been filled and I should henceforth have to stay the Reaper with bladderwort and joss, my car could wind up ferrying Armalites through the Bogside until Special Branch megaphones hove to outside my house informing me that I had three minutes to come out with my hands up, and if I did not shred the cherished adoption certificate, some base Tichborne claimant might appear at the London Zoo and tell my pelican that he was its real father. They’re gullible birds. As for my Confederate Air Force colonelcy, bestowed in 1987 for wag services rendered in Atlanta, if the accreditation fell into the wrong hands and my doppelganger got up in a plane and fired on Fort Sumter, I would be blamed for starting Civil War Two. Being made, as the result, a colonel in Al Qaida would be scant consolation.

  Trickier yet, as I shredded I listened to my radio – if it is my radio, it may well be licensed to a Mallorcan by now – and therefore to a lot of hysterical gargle about the French referendum. Since one of the constituents of the ex-constitution, I gather, was the eurowide strengthening of privacy protection, the landmark Non may well act as a carte blanche for the hitherto hesitant. What, for example, is to stop a Pole from poaching my membership of the P. G. Wodehouse Society, spending a week at the Paris Ritz in spats and a monocle as Gussie Fink-Nottleski, and charging the whole thing to my account? And God knows how many points are, as I write, being totted up on my driving licence by Maltese joy-riders.

  Indeed, it has just occurred to me that you may not be reading what I’m writing at all, unless you are an Eskimo, given that it is being hacked out on a computer prior to e-mailing and therefore highly vulnerable to turning up in tomorrow’s Inuit Morning Advertiser, since the shredder and I were unable to find the Post-It on which I scribbled my password in 1997. Some years back, it either blew off the printer when the daily opened a window to let the smoke out, or someone nicked it. I hadn’t thought about it, until now.

  Nor had I thought about ID cards. These will be dropping onto our mats any minute, once we have collectively forked out 18 billion pounds, and I shall snatch mine up immediately. No time must be lost in shredding it.

  Losing Your Bottle

  IT being humid this morning and my attic window open, I can hear – though he is buried far away – my grandfather turning in his grave.

  Not so odd, you reply, we live in plummeting times, there is much to spin Britain’s buried grandpas: were you to stroll through Stoke Poges churchyard today, the lowing of the winding herd would be drowned by the racket of grumpy dead men. You have a point – but not this one: for my grandfather took life as it came (took it, indeed, as it went) without complaint at its decline. You would not have caught him staring glumly out of his Wembley window and observing that it is not now as it hath been of yore.

  Even in 1943. Or, rather, especially in 1943. Because my grandfather knew not only what he was fighting for, but also that his country was as equal to that fight as she had ever been. I say fighting, but since he was the exact age I am now, he was armed only with an ARP warden’s helmet and a stirrup pump; he knew, in short, what he was fire-watching for. You could tell that from the helmet: black (so that the Luftwaffe wouldn’t spot his moonlit silver hair), it had two brief messages daubed on it in white. One read ‘Dig here for Dave!’, the other ‘God save the King!’ In the event of his being buried by rubble, my grandfather wanted the world to know both who had died with his gumboots on, and what he had died for.

  But the world wouldn’t need to be told that, if, like me, it had shared his breakfast every day. When he came in from his night’s watching, his plate would be ready in front of him, and in front of it would be three bottles: HP brown sauce, Lea & Perrins’ Worcester sauce, and Camp coffee; but the bottle which wasn’t there was as telling as those which were. His ritual was unvaried: I would sit opposite him, jaws glued together by my grandmother’s porridge, and he would tap the bottles with his eggy knife and remind me that all were supplied by appointment to His Majesty King George VI. More yet, he would bang on, HP sauce was named for the Houses of Parlia
ment: you can see that from the picture of Big Ben on the label. So not only our gracious King and Queen, he would explain, were smacking the bottom of their sauce bottles at the exact same moment as their loyal subjects, so were all our great, and democratically elected, leaders. God knows what bloody Hitler and bloody Tojo are sloshing on their breakfasts this morning, was his invariable coda, but you can be bloody sure it isn’t this.

  Don’t swear, my grandmother would say, he’s only five, but he would ignore her, because there was one more very important point he was already making about HP sauce: it had been invented in 1899, at the start of the Boer War, so that the soldiers of the queen would have something to help bully beef go down. And if you want to know what a soldier of the queen looked like, he would add – not without a justified grin at his polyglot segue – have a shufti at the coffee. I did not have to ask what a shufti was: he had explained it on umpteen similar occasions when passing me the Camp coffee bottle, because the label showed a kilted Indian Army subaltern being served a silver-plattered cup by an egregiously devoted Sikh batman.

  That my grandfather saw British history in exclusively gustatory terms would finally be confirmed with the splash of Lea & Perrins onto the bread he used to wipe his plate: he would observe, yet again, that the bloody Yanks could not pronounce Worcester. He was no fan of the Americans: he had waited three grisly years for them to join him in the Flanders mud, and well-nigh as long this time around; and therein lies the significance of the bottle that wasn’t there. He wouldn’t have Heinz ketchup in the house. Not only was it American, the American who invented it, in 1885, had been born German. That my grandfather never pointed out that 1885 was the year Gordon was killed at Khartoum, where were the bloody Yanks that time, need you bloody ask, has often, down the long arches of the years, puzzled me.