a word from the unwise

A week of disclosures in which it has become obvious that the royal family, the banking industry, the House of Commons and the House of Lords , ankle deep in corruption, are only interested in aassing hordes of cash and have nothing but contempt for the ordinary people.

 

So what else is new?

 

A TV documentary claimed that the Royal Family does not disclose travel expenses below £10.000, leaving itself free to use £6.000 an hour helicopters. Thus following the fine tradition of The House of Hanover from which it sprang.

 

In the midst of this collapsing society I am a great deal more worried about the collapsing me.

 

I have been reading with great pleasure the letters of Rupert Hart Davies and Humph’s father George Lyttleton. He quotes Bishop Creighton’s admirable dictum “It is almost impossible to exaggerate the complete unimportance of everything.”

 

A friend and I worked out the one essential possession. Mine was a brewery; his, more modestly, was a fountain pen that worked.

 

When I have looked back on that discussion half a century ago, I have always been amazed at the useless things I have collected as hobby succeeded hobby. Guns, rods, LPs of every Shakespeare play, four desks and a library that filled three rooms. From time to time I have tried to whittle down my needs. Now that I have washed up on the sad shores of temperance a distillery seems out of the question. The last time I tried I found the essentials in my life were my garden and my gum boots

I was particularly fond of my gum boots and surprised that no one had written a sonnet about them. They were the most comfortable items of footwear in my wardrobe. I could stomp about in them for hours like some overweight Paddington Bear. In their own clumsy way they evoke the 18^th century and the great Duke of Wellington who made them fashionable. Worn as I wore them, with knee breeches, they were pleasantly reminiscent of that great literary hero of mine Mr Jorrocks, the hunting grocer. His creator Surtees embodied him best in a single quote as he slid under the dinner table: “Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.”

 

Not only did our sentiments chime; we were of the same generous proportions of width with minimum height. As broad as I was long, I embodied the all round reporter. Mr Five by Five was me to a T.

 

Whilst wearing gum boots was an unalloyed joy, getting them on without outside aid was out of the question. Goodness knows, socks are bad enough but at least they are malleable . When the Princess finally comes round with a crystal gum boot seeking the hand of the foot that fits it, I hope the Ferret is at home. Otherwise the pumpkin carriage remains a dream.

 

There was a time when I could not reach my ankle. Now the calf is Terra Incognita. My belly is the last unconquered summit. The arm cannot climb over it and God, whose design abilities you may recall I do not admire, has so constructed that luckless limb that it is just too short to go round it. It may be his idea of a celestial joke but the only way to grip the gum boot is to stand on one leg with the other at the high port. This involves much spirited hopping and is deeply undignified.

 

Of course even this is no longer true. I discovered this morning that in an act of supreme carelessness I have just lost two stone. Yet it has been nearly a month since I have been able to get into gum boots at all. Largely bedridden, I have been attached for the last three weeks to an electric pump which, according to the flotilla of district nurses who visit me every day, is healing my operation scar. Thus I not only have The Bag: I also have The Pump which is constantly at my side, grumbling quietly. I am a sort of human Pompidou building. All my works are on the outside and I shit from the hip, like some topsy turvey Wyatt Earp.

NOT ALL ABROAD IS BLOODY

Near bedfast as I am, neverthless, as spring approaches, it takes all my native cunning to talk the Head Ferret out of going abroad for a holiday.  The exceptions I would be prepared to allow if The Bag permitted  are Vienna and Bruges.  My favourite is Bruges.

 

The cuisine in Bruges beats Paris; its canals are more romantic - and a good deal more sanitary - than those of Venice; its fiacres are cheaper than Viennese ones; its bier houses as good as Amsterdam.  Its “primitives” are preferable to Italian religious paintings or the overworked Impressionists of France.

 

On our holidays there I have never had better service.  A notice in our room claimed the hotel would put any problem right in fifteen minutes.  When I mentioned the breakfast bar had run out of croissants, a porter rushed to a baker and returned with bags full of the delicious items, piping hot.

 

Romantics arriving at the railway station, or ‘t Zand, where the coaches stop, will be disappointed.  Savour the moment.  It is the only disappointment you will experience.

 

Walk up the Zuidzandstraat which runs off ‘t Zand.  You soon reach the medieval heart, overshadowed by the 13th century, 250-foot bell tower.  The True Love could not wait to bound up the 366 steps to be bats in the belfry.  I did not join her.  The tower has a three-foot lean.

 

Opposite are 16th century guild houses, now restaurants.  We chose Pannier d’Or (the golden bread basket), lunched on mussels in its heated pavement café and later dined superbly on game by a roaring fire in a panelled dining room.

 

On our first visit we were so charmed by this square, the shops, canals and cafes, that we did not discover the Burg, without question the loveliest square in Europe.  Burg is dominated by the 14th century Town Hall, a Gothic masterpiece where the Great Hall glows with murals and the Aldermen’s Room is dominated by a massive 15th century fireplace.  Next door is the Chapel of the Holy Blood.  Its reliquary, containing The Blood, has been paraded round the city every Ascension Day since the second Crusade.

 

An unmissable bistro is the chic canalside ‘t Traptje in the Wollestraat.  Glamorous, fashionably dressed. Carla has sat at the bar for twenty years.  Could not take my eyes off her, even when I was told she was wax.  Why? No one likes to come into an empty bar, we were told.

 

For less expensive mussel mountains, rib steaks, stewed eel in chervil sauce eaten to the sound of classical music, try the candlelit Chagall in St Amandsstraat.

 

There are three ways to discover Old Bruges.  Walk round it, drive through it in horse-drawn fiacre or float on the romantic canals which encircle it.  We chose all three.  In the Walplaats, seeking lace workers, we saw, outside a cafe, a tiny dog bar with a drinking bowl and a tariff which read “dogs free. Photos 5 francs.“

 

Another walk brought us to the Church of Our Lady with its 400 ft tower, a lighthouse when Bruges was a port.  The port itself has been transformed into a great lake, the Minnewater (the lake of love).  Emperor Maximilian ordered swans must always be kept there in memory of the murder of one of his courtiers.

 

The glory of the church is Michelangelo’s incomparable Mother and Child, the only one of his sculptures to leave Italy in his lifetime.

 

Nearby, the Groeninge Museum shows van Eyck’s breath-taking Madonna, one of the world’s great paintings, and Bosch’s nightmare Last Judgement.  The Memling Museum is devoted to the six surviving masterpieces of the Flemish master Hans Memling.

 

One of Bruges’s pubs has a hundred varieties of beer.  Need I say more?

 

**********************************************8

 

THE FINAL FAREWELL TO EMPIRE

 

Reading newspapers on my sick bed gives some ide of how Gibbon must have felt that afternoon when he decided to write about the Fall of the Roman Empire. It is quite clear that what we are seeing are the death throes of the British Empire, which was conceived in greed but managed for many years to stay the blood letting instincts of the native politicians over whom it had a measure of control.

Africa is in a state of collapse and enough time has passed for us to be able to see the Opera Bouffe which was the Last Days of the Raj in India.

Gibbon would have much fun with first: the notion of planting  a giant hedge which cut India in half; abandoning that in favour of setting up a man, a civil servant who had never been to India before, in a bungalow with a book of maps and tasking him with drawing the Line of Partition. He might have glanced at the wisdom of creating a Royal Oaf like MountbattenViceroy in  place of a scholar like Wavell who knew and loved the continent. A Royal Oaf whose twin obsessions was keeping his wife out of the bed of his coloured opponents and getting g everything sorted in time for him to scurry home and join the Festivities which sprang from the adoption of the nephew of his choice into the House of Windsor.

Gibbon, I fancy, would have  been diverted by the jointly held opinion of the native proponents of Partition, that by the time it came to deciding, they were all too tired to think clearly.

Gibbon would have a fine time with the British Empire, the symptoms of whose fall are all around us. I fancy he would point out that, like the rest of the so-called developed world, we operated under a  financial system which spectacularly broke down ever century or so, providing material for both Dickens and Trollope, and required regular wars to stroke it into life.

 

********************************************

 

AND SO TO BED

 

 

 

My eldest daughter sleeps in the same brass bedstead in which, but for a welcome turn of speed on the part of a midwife, she would have been born.  A bed I, in turn, had inherited from a deceased parent.

 

I am all for ancient beds.  The best sleep I have ever had was in 1941 in Bonsall in Derbyshire, immersed, for no other word can describe its welcome, in the flock mattress of a lady called Grannie Gerrard after the bombing of Manchester had driven us from our home.

 

You would have liked Grannie Gerrard.  Whenever German bombers flew overhead she would scuttle nimbly out of her cottage, switch on her torch and train the beam skywards.  It was said in the village that she harboured Nazi sympathies and the local policeman was sent to investigate.  Not so, she told him.  She was shining the light in the pilots’ eyes to dazzle them so they wouldn’t be able to see her cottage.  I remember thinking at the time that anything which protected  my flock mattress was a good thing and I only wish I had it today.

 

All columns have a reason and the reason for this one is a pronoucement by a Tourist Board spokesman.

 

“The fundamental reason for going to a hotel is to sleep.  And no one can have a comfortable night in a bed that is more than ten years old.”

 

Only foreigners stay in hotels.  British gentlemen and their ladies stay in guest houses or pubs which are ‘omes from ‘ome.  One of the charms of ‘omes from ‘ome is the variety of furniture which is encountered in them.  Most of it picked up for a song in the auction room.

 

The truth is that a bed needs bottle age and lineage.  A mattress, like a woman, is only interesting in middle age.  You can always tell when you are in a bed that has enshrined a happy marriage.  A recumbent body on the outer rim of the mattress finds itself rolling inexorably towards the centre.  Beds with a three-in-one gradient from the middle out are mute witnesses to domestic disharmony.

 

There is, of course, a secret bed code which a friend of mine accidentally broke.  He had the usual bachelor’s dilemma.  He was at that happy stage in life when a double bed would have been a thoughtless extravagance and a single bed too narrow for the passing guest.

 

He took the problem to a superior furniture store in Kensington.

 

“What sir wants, “ the assistant informed him, “is a gentleman’s occasional.”

 

ends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CAT A TONIC

 

 

There are cats that will be reincarnated as hearth rugs and we need not detain ourselves with them.  There are cats that shrink at the sight of you and then bolt in a fear, it is reasonable to suspect, is assumed.  Then there is another kind of cat.

 

This kind of cat is usually ginger and always a Tom.  This kind of cat leaps out at you from behind sofas and sideboards and anywhere he can lay in wait.  When you go for a walk he accompanies you until he is distracted by a passing dandelion clock or the prospect of a mouse.  He bullies your dogs and leaps onto your morning paper when you spread it on the breakfast table.  He hears your car in the drive and rushes to meet you and welcome you home.

 

He kills birds and scatters their feathers over your best carpet; leaves the indigestible organs of mice just where you are about to put your bare feet.  This is the kind of cat T.S. Elliot wrote about.  It is the cat called Jeoffrey that the drunken and mad poet Christopher Smart recalled in his 18th century Bedlam:

 

“For he keeps the lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.

“For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.“

 

He is the cat who swam the Thames and crawled down a chimney of the Tower of London in the reign of Elizabeth I to console his master Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, the boyfriend of Shakespeare, who was imprisoned there.

 

He is the cat who, according to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is the Sun God Ra himself.  He is Bast, the cat-headed god of Bubastis.  He is Pangur Ban, the pet of an anonymous eighth century monk who wrote in the margin of his illuminated manuscript:

 

“’Gainst the wall he sets his eye,

“Full and fierce and sharp and sly;

“’Gainst the wall of knowledge I

“All my little wisdom try.”

 

He is the cat that, with “Memory“, made a musician out of Andrew Lloyd Webber.. He is the cat of whom the 16th century essayist Montaigne asked: “When my cat and I entertain each other with mutual apish tricks, as playing with a garter, who knows but that I make my cat more sport than she makes me.”

 

He is one of several ginger cats we had.  Pudding, who died after being run over by a car and  left a hole in our lives many times larger than the tiny space he occupied in life.

 

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

 

 

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

 

Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases.  As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers.  And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.

Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heat waves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as one winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages.  The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands.  But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago?  While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.

So one awkward question you can ask when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change is: “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?”  It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming.  While you’re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it’s confirmed that global warming has stopped.  The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

That leveling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do.  After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high, but roughly level, state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun become hyper-active again.

 

 

 

I see where the Home Secretary is entitled to charge £116,000 for a second home in London, although she lodges in her sister’s house.

 

It is perfectly legal, she insists.

 

Of course it is.  She is one of the law makers.  How much trouble would have been saved if the Great Train Robbers had sat in Parliament and defended their right to pillage mail trains.

 

Bankers are allowed to increase their bonuses by taking unnecessary risks in the certain knowledge, that if the risks come unstuck, the losses will be made up by the tax payer.  Off hand I cannot remember how many MPs take profitable directorships with banks when they leave office.

 

GOOD MANNERS MAYKITH YTOUBLE

A distressed friend seeks my advice.

 

“Flown with wine and impertinence, I behaved very badly at a recent party.  How can I extricate myself and regain social goodwill?”

Lie, little friend.  Whatever you say, your hosts are not going to alter their opinion, because people try to think badly of each other if they possibly can.  Personally, I favour lies so totally improbable they might just be true.

I once behaved so badly at the 100th birthday party of a very aristocratic lady that my attempt to kiss a lady governor of the BBC went largely unremarked.  The next day I wrote to my host:

“I understand that a person posing as me attended your mother’s birthday party yesterday and behaved badly.

“It is not the first time this has happened and the police are on the look out for him. Unfortunately, the likeness between us is so exact I have myself been cautioned by them for behaviour of his.

“He is a cunning fellow and I still cannot think how he managed to sneak into my home and borrow my suit, returning it in the early hours in a disgusting condition.  But that will give you some idea what the police are up against.

“I will of course make good any damage done by him.”

Now that I am virtually bone dry, I can look back on these follies with indulgence, though I am still not to be entirely trusted with whisky-flavoured ice cream.  Of course, there is always that delicious moment when you fall off the wagon and then anything can happen.

The most embarrassing moment of all was not really my fault.  A delicious girl I met in Bad Hartsburg at the end of the war invited me to meet her father, a Junker Baron, warning me he hated the English.

 

She did not warn me that he hated Scots.  Otherwise I would not have dressed in full fig - kilt, white spats, belt, and hair sporran.

He was waiting for me in the entrance hall of his apartment, seated at a table on which was a decanter of colourless fluid and two glasses.

He poured drinks, barked “Prosit” and downed his in one.  I swear it was rocket fuel. Mine would not go past my epiglottis.  The next one lay on top of it and the merciless third, on which he insisted with mounting malevolence, stirred the others into action.

I rushed to the bathroom.  No time to reach the lavatory.  My pink tribute flowed into the bath.  Reaching for the tap to ease its passage down the drain, I mistakenly turned on the shower and was drenched.

At the frosty dinner which followed no one mentioned my soaking condition, though steam rose from me in billowing clouds, rivers of white Blanco ran down my kilt and small pools of water from the sporran that looked like a drowned  badger formed at my feet.

But you could see the Baron felt some consolation for losing the war.

 

 

As spring approaches it takes all my native cunning to talk the Head Ferret out of going abroad for a holiday.  The exceptions are Vienna and Bruges.  But my favourite is Bruges.

 

The cuisine in Bruges beats Paris; its canals are more romantic - and a good deal more sanitary - than those of Venice; its fiacres are cheaper than Viennese ones; its bier houses as good as Amsterdam.  Its “primitives” are preferable to Italian religious paintings or the overworked Impressionists of France.

 

On our holidays there I have never had better service.  A notice in our room claimed the hotel would put any problem right in fifteen minutes.  When I mentioned the breakfast bar had run out of croissants, a porter rushed to a baker and returned with bags full of the delicious items, piping hot.

 

Romantics arriving at the railway station, or ‘t Zand, where the coaches stop, will be disappointed.  Savour the moment.  It is the only disappointment you will experience.

 

Walk up the Zuidzandstraat which runs off ‘t Zand.  You soon reach the medieval heart, overshadowed by the 13th century, 250-foot bell tower.  The True Love could not wait to bound up the 366 steps to be bats in the belfry.  I did not join her.  The tower has a three-foot lean.

 

Opposite are 16th century guild houses, now restaurants.  We chose Pannier d’Or (the golden bread basket), lunched on mussels in its heated pavement café and later dined superbly on game by a roaring fire in a panelled dining room.

 

On our first visit we were so charmed by this square, the shops, canals and cafes, that we did not discover the Burg, without question the loveliest square in Europe.  Burg is dominated by the 14th century Town Hall, a Gothic masterpiece where the Great Hall glows with murals and the Aldermen’s Room is dominated by a massive 15th century fireplace.  Next door is the Chapel of the Holy Blood.  Its reliquary, containing The Blood, has been paraded round the city every Ascension Day since the second Crusade.

 

An unmissable bistro is the chic canalside ‘t Traptje in the Wollestraat.  Glamorous, fashionably dressed. Carla has sat at the bar for twenty years.  Could not take my eyes off her, even when I was told she was wax.

 

For less expensive mussel mountains, rib steaks, stewed eel in chervil sauce eaten to the sound of classical music, try the candlelit Chagall in St Amandsstraat.

 

There are three ways to discover Old Bruges.  Walk round it, drive through it in horse-drawn fiacre or float on the romantic canals which encircle it.  We chose all three.  In the Walplaats, seeking lace workers, we saw, outside a cafe, a tiny dog bar with a drinking bowl and a tariff which read “dogs free. Photos 5 francs.“

 

Another walk brought us to the Church of Our Lady with its 400 ft tower, a lighthouse when Bruges was a port.  The port itself has been transformed into a great lake, the Minnewater (the lake of love).  Emperor Maximilian ordered swans must always be kept there in memory of the murder of one of his courtiers.

 

The glory of the church is Michelangelo’s incomparable Mother and Child, the only one of his sculptures to leave Italy in his lifetime.

 

Nearby, the Groeninge Museum shows van Eyck’s breath-taking Madonna, one of the world’s great paintings, and Bosch’s nightmare Last Judgement.  The Memling Museum is devoted to the six surviving masterpieces of the Flemish master Hans Memling.

 

One of Bruges’s pubs has a hundred varieties of beer.  Need I say more?

Too witless to view

And so we say farewell to the Protestant Work Ethic. The last frontier has been breached and the generations of Methodists who are embalmed in my genes shrivel like vampires touched by the sun.

 

I have had a TV set erected in my bedroom.

 

Gone are the days I would not watch TV of any kind during daylight hours. Now I am the unwilling prey of those bumptious young men of little wit and absolutely no presence, those haughty beauties being clumsily and self-consciously coy, who are the presenters of morning programmes of alleged news.

 

At 3 am one morning I caught myself watching yet again ”Hill Street Blues”.and reflecting that Hell would be being trapped in a police car with one of those caring homespun policemen forever worrying about daddies who, quite understandably, don’t love them. There is worse. Not only do they repeat classic shows like “Minder” to the point where one begins to dislike them: the latest development is to remake old series with a different cast. Presumably they are blind to the fact that “Minder” owed much of its genius to the casting of Waterman and Cole.

 

In my early days as a freelance reporter I had many friends in the rainbow world of ducking and diving that exists on the edge of the dull world we all inhabit. So accurate was the portrayal of Terry and Arthur they could have slipped seamlessly into the rainbow.

In this age of mediocrity I should expect little else from almost everything I examine. It is not a political statement, merely an observation to say that we are badly governed. Manacled, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, in chains of unworkable legislation.

 

The brave new worlds of extra terrestrial TV are merely the homes of aged repeats and what little original TV we see is shamed by the quality of our past.

 

The banking industry has brought Western Civilisation to its knees because, frankly, it is not very good at banking and does not seem to grasp the first law. DO NOT LEND MONEY TO PEOPLE WHO CANNOT PAY YOU BACK. I notice that banks are reluctant to lend money to each other which suggests certain shortcomings. If a bank cannot borrow from a bank should we leave our money with it?

 

The second rule is not to get involved in things you don’t understand. When greedy bankers moved into property development and building societies, crocodile tears at bonus times were inevitable.

 

The third rule is to watch the overheads. A professional gambler of my acquaintance put it at its most succinct: “Exes ruin all games and do not place a bet before you have studied the form book.” Poor Lol, he could have saved Western Civilisation with those simple words.

 

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I ws going to spend my convalescence trying to find something worth reading in the newspapers. I fear I have failed. There were nuggets, of course, but what used to be a newspaper is now a forum on which a number of people of whom one has never heard  lecture on the government, the drama, literature, schools and any other subject that occurs to their ready pen.

 

So far as I can discover, few of them have any qualifications in the subjects they seek to dominate.

 

Radio, which I love above all things, is in a sad state. Would poor Carol Thatcher have been sacked for an innocent remark in the Green Room had she been anyone but the daughter of the Prime Minister the BBC hates above all?

 

I am frequently called a Teddy Bear and I fail to see why Golliwog should be thought to be a term of abuse since both refer to the cuddly toys we enjoyed in childhood when a Teddy and a Golly served me, an only one, as brothers.

 

What one should say about transport and education systems that collapse under the weight of a snowflake, I do not know. This news item from the Times did not help. It said that children who threw snowballs in public places were warned they could be arrested or fined for antisocial behaviour.

 

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

A distressed friend seeks my advice.

 

“Flown with wine and impertinence, I behaved very badly at a recent party.  How can I extricate myself and regain social goodwill?”

Lie, little friend.  Whatever you say, your hosts are not going to alter their opinion, because people try to think badly of each other if they possibly can.  Personally, I favour lies so totally improbable they might just be true.

I once behaved so badly at the 100th birthday party of a very aristocratic lady that my attempt to kiss a lady governor of the BBC went largely unremarked.  The next day I wrote to my host:

“I understand that a person posing as me attended your mother’s birthday party yesterday and behaved badly.

“It is not the first time this has happened and the police are on the look out for him. Unfortunately, the likeness between us is so exact I have myself been cautioned by them for behaviour of his.

“He is a cunning fellow and I still cannot think how he managed to sneak into my home and borrow my suit, returning it in the early hours in a disgusting condition.  But that will give you some idea what the police are up against.

“I will of course make good any damage done by him.”

Now that I am virtually bone dry, I can look back on these follies with indulgence, though I am still not to be entirely trusted with whisky-flavoured ice cream.  Of course, there is always that delicious moment when you fall off the wagon and then anything can happen.

The most embarrassing moment of all was not really my fault.  A delicious girl I met in Bad Hartsburg at the end of the war invited me to meet her father, a Junker Baron, warning me he hated the English.

 

She did not warn me that he hated Scots.  Otherwise I would not have dressed in full fig - kilt, white spats, belt, and hair sporran.

He was waiting for me in the entrance hall of his apartment, seated at a table on which was a decanter of colourless fluid and two glasses.

He poured drinks, barked “Prosit” and downed his in one.  I swear it was rocket fuel. Mine would not go past my epiglottis.  The next one lay on top of it and the merciless third, on which he insisted with mounting malevolence, stirred the others into action.

I rushed to the bathroom.  No time to reach the lavatory.  My pink tribute flowed into the bath.  Reaching for the tap to ease its passage down the drain, I mistakenly turned on the shower and was drenched.

At the frosty dinner which followed no one mentioned my soaking condition, though steam rose from me in billowing clouds, rivers of white Blanco ran down my kilt and small pools of water from the sporran that looked like a drowned  badger formed at my feet.

But you could see the Baron felt some consolation for losing the war.

 

 

SIC TRANSIT JESSE MATTHEWS……………………….

 

A reader, Sarah Thomas, writes:

 

I don't know much about Jesse Matthews. Googled to deal with my ignorance and am not any the wiser: I got, along with much else, a reference to the national Scrabble championship, a notice of appeal, dated 2008, by someone in the state of Tennessee who has been convicted of assault and battery, and a poster dating from 1936 which must be the relevant Jesse but it didn't enlighten me.

 

Sarah: - Miss Matthews was a Soubrette, star of pre-war theatre and films who lived on to become Mrs Dale in that famous Diary on the Home Service, now known as Radio 4.

On becoming A semi colon

...........which fully expected to become a full stop

Wearing a stoma bag, I find, is like having a ferret in your trousers. A very talkative ferret which mutters to itself in a cross sort of way, although I am told it will settle in due time into gloomy silence.

 In view of what he has done for me, I would not wish to seem critical of God as Designer but I have to say that the artificial arrangement with the gubbins on the outside, rather like the Pompidou building in Paris, has many advantages over the original model. So much so that in the considerable literature devoted to colon surgery there is an article on Stoma Envy among wives who are no stranger to hurried exits to the bathroom.

I was a bit worried the surgeon might miss the target organ when he mistook my wife for my daughter, not the first person to do so, I regret to say. In the event, he proved a triumph, although he admitted that I had been hard work. It took him six and a half hours hard digging, which was complicated when I had chronic kidney failure. I doubt he did much digging in the garden last weekend. It turned out he was TA and had been MO to the Black Watch (RHR) in Iraq.

I was only in hospital a week, though I cannot think why I was in a rush to come home. I was treated like Haroun el Raschid, with pretty ladies by the score tending to my every need.

 And what fascinating studies they were. One, a Filipino, when I asked if all her country folk were small, put her hand to her head and said “four foot”. Then she put her hand to her waist and extended it outward saying “eleven foot”.

 She said she got angry when people criticised the NHS service. “In my country we do not have it,” she told me. “Few of us can afford doctors so we have to rely on homeopathic cures.”

 “What? For cancer ? What happens?”

“We die,“ she said.

 One of my doctors, an ex Australian SAS man, admitted to me that when he thought of the NHS he found it difficult not to cry, so noble were its aims.

 Many of the nurses have three jobs and run homes as well. We had such a pair last weekend who overheard my wife calling me “Whisker”, her rather embarrassing pet name for me. They used it loudly at every opportunity. So in revenge I called them Burke and Hare.

 Their excitement at the wonders of medicine was a delight to behold. Even simple operations sent them into transports of joy.

 “Look at that dressing.” they would say. “I have never seen anything like that.”

 I said, “You don’t fill me with confidence.” But they were too excited to hear.

I was pinioned by more catheters than St Sebastian had arrows. Taking one out the size of a Prussian bayonet, “Burke” shrieked with joy. “I have never seen one that long,” she said. “Neither have I,“ said “Hare, “Leave it in for a minute while I go and get Susan. She would love to see it.”

 By the time they took the catheter out I was rather miffed not to get a  round of applause.

 In many ways cancer was a doddle. Breaking out of the hospital was another matter. I had permission from the Escape Committee (doctor, surgeon, and bagpuss-fitter - who only agreed after I demonstrated before her and two rather startled medical students that I could fit a stoma bag unaided.

 I pointed out that I had written 26 books, night news edited three national newspapers, was a fellow of the Royal Cambrian Academy, a Member of the Welsh Academy and an award-winning broadcaster so I might just manage to stick a bag on my belly. But they had obviously set their little hearts on a cabaret so I put the bag on like fishnet tights in a strip club, singing "Stoma Weather" the while.)

 The Staff Nurse still wouldn't let me out until the prescription department had issued me with my tablets. I pointed out, with some heat, that the only tablets I had to take out were the ones I had brought in with me. Still had to wait three hours.

 None of the foregoing should be taken as criticism of the NHS. I think Aneurin Bevan is a candidate for sainthood. The country may be broke but there is still one priceless jewel in our kitty.

 I, for one, am very grateful.

A

On Becoming a Semi Colon

..........which fully expected to become a full stop

Wearing a stoma bag, I find, is like having a ferret in your trousers. A very talkative ferret which mutters to itself in a cross sort of way, although I am told it will settle in due time into gloomy silence.

 In view of what he has done for me, I would not wish to seem critical of God as Designer but I have to say that the artificial arrangement with the gubbins on the outside, rather like the Pompidou building in Paris, has many advantages over the original model. So much so that in the considerable literature devoted to colon surgery there is an article on Stoma Envy among wives who are no stranger to hurried exits to the bathroom.

I was a bit worried the surgeon might miss the target organ when he mistook my wife for my daughter, not the first person to do so, I regret to say. In the event, he proved a triumph, although he admitted that I had been hard work. It took him six and a half hours hard digging, which was complicated when I had chronic kidney failure. I doubt he did much digging in the garden last weekend. It turned out he was TA and had been MO to the Black Watch (RHR) inIraq.

I was only in hospital a week, though I cannot think why I was in a rush to come home. I was treated like Haroun el Raschid, with pretty ladies by the score tending to my every need.

 And what fascinating studies they were. One, a Filipino, when I asked if all her country folk were small, put her hand to her head and said “four foot”. Then she put her hand to her waist and extended it outward saying “eleven foot”.

 She said she got angry when people criticised the NHS service. “In my country we do not have it,” she told me. “Few of us can afford doctors so we have to rely on homeopathic cures.”

 “What? For cancer ? What happens?”

“We die,“ she said.

 One of my doctors, an ex Australian SAS man, admitted to me that when he thought of the NHS he found it difficult not to cry, so noble were its aims.

 Many of the nurses have three jobs and run homes as well. We had such a pair last weekend who overheard my wife calling me “Whisker”, her rather embarrassing pet name for me. They used it loudly at every opportunity. So in revenge I called them Burke and Hare.

 Their excitement at the wonders of medicine was a delight to behold. Even simple operations sent them into transports of joy.

 “Look at that dressing.” they would say. “I have never seen anything like that.”

 I said, “You don’t fill me with confidence.” But they were too excited to hear.

I was pinioned by more catheters than St Sebastian had arrows. Taking one out the size of a Prussian bayonet, “Burke” shrieked with joy. “I have never seen one that long,” she said. “Neither have I,“ said “Hare, “Leave it in for a minute while I go and get Susan. She would love to see it.”

 By the time they took the catheter out I was rather miffed not to get a  round of applause.

 In many ways cancer was a doddle. Breaking out of the hospital was another matter. I had permission from the Escape Committee (doctor, surgeon, and bagpuss-fitter - who only agreed after I demonstrated before her and two rather startled medical students that I could fit a stoma bag unaided.

 I pointed out that I had written 26 books, night news edited three national newspapers, was a fellow of the Royal Cambrian Academy, a Member of the Welsh Academy and an award-winning broadcaster so I might just manage to stick a bag on my belly. But they had obviously set their little hearts on a cabaret so I put the bag on like fishnet tights in a strip club, singing "Stoma Weather" the while.)

 The Staff Nurse still wouldn't let me out until the prescription department had issued me with my tablets. I pointed out, with some heat, that the only tablets I had to take out were the ones I had brought in with me. Still had to wait three hours.

 None of the foregoing should be taken as criticism of the NHS. I think Aneurin Bevan is a candidate for sainthood. The country may be broke but there is still one priceless jewel in our kitty.

 I, for one, am very grateful.

A