by Alan Coren
‘Good morning, Noddy Noddeyovich! I have a nice worm ragout cooking on the stove for your lunch.’
Or:
‘You should have a young lady, Noddy Noddeyovich! It is not right for a fine young man to spend so much time in the company of gnomes.’
At this, the young man would fall to the ground and kiss the hem of her garment.
But on this occasion, Mrs. Rabbitoyeva called Noddy Noddeyovich into her kitchen, and, despite the fearful trembling of his limbs which set the bell upon his cap tinkling like some derisory omen of imminent doom, he followed her. He counted his steps, as he always did – eleven, twelve, thirteen, to the table, fourteen, fifteen, to the workbench, where the knives were, and the big meat chopper. The kitchen smelt of boiled sedge, and old ferret offal, and the grey, fatty soup that Mrs. Rabbitoyeva always kept simmering for the pitiful little civil servants who inhabited her dark, cold building.
‘Noddy Noddeyovich,’ said Mrs. Rabbitoyeva, ‘I wish to talk with you about the Gollies Karamazov.’
His trembling worsened. The Gollies Karamazov had recently moved in to the room next to Noddy Noddeyovich, and they came from the Big Wood, and their faces were black as round holes in the white winter ice. Whenever Noddy Noddeyovich saw them, he began to shake all over, and often he was sick down the stairwell, and sometimes he fainted altogether. He did not want to talk about the Gollies Karamazov. He listened for a while to the sound of Mrs. Rabbitoyeva, and it was of no sense, a heavy buzz, like the flies upon the far steppes when spring wakes the eggs.
And then he picked up the big meat chopper, and he brought it down on Mrs. Rabbitoyeva’s old head, and she looked very surprised, and when the blood was all over his hands, their trembling stopped.
‘I should not be here,’ said Noddy Noddeyovich, possibly aloud. ‘Soon Plod Plodnikov of the State Police will be here for his morning glass of tea, and he may engage me in some philosophical discussion about guilt, with reference to the words of Morotny, and it would be better if I were to get in my little car and go Beep! Beep! and seek the advice of Bigears Bigearsnitkin . . .’
From FIVE GO OFF TO ELSINORE
by William Shakespeare
ACT ONE, Scene 1
Cheam, a desert country near the sea. Before the gates of The Laburnums. Alarums off. Sennets. Keatons. Enter Julian.
Julian: Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
The hols are but a short week old, and now
There comes such news as Hecate herself
Would quake to hear of! Five years of study gone
And now I learn that all I have to show
Is two O-levels: one Eng. Lit., one Maths!
Five subjects failed, and I one subject felled
By failure to as fell a fall as folly
Feels!
Enter Timmy, a dog.
Ah, Timmy! Had I but the joy
Of e’en thy meanest flea, I were in luck!
Timmy: Arf! Arf!
Julian: Unmetric!
Timmy: Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf!
Julian (weeps): The very dogs do bend them to my pleas,
Though men do reck me not! But yet I’m wrecked!
Enter Georgina.
Georgina: How now, sweet coz! I am this sec arrived
From Cheltenham Ladies’ College for the vac!
And we shall do such things, we Famous Five—
Find maps, thwart thieves, have midnight feasts
In ruined castles, smugglers’ coves, and more
Deserted cottages than you’ve had hot—
Julian: Eff off, Georgina! All has come to nought!
A sound career with ICI is lost!
And I must hie me with my measly two
And seek emolument as Clerk (Grade IV).
No longer mine, the tree-house and the barge,
The secret passage and – but ho! What comes?
Enter Dick and Anne.
Dick: Look, dearest Anne! We Five are now conjoined
As one, like some great Lyons Sponge Cake late
Divided, and now once more new enseamed!
Julian (aside): It is my younger brother. Dare I ask
How he has fared in this last GCE?
Holloa, sweet Dick! How goes the world withal?
Dick: Withal, indeed! With all six subjects passed, Geog., Maths, Eng. Lit., French, History, and Stinks!
Anne: Oh, rippin’, Dick! Top-hole, spot on, good show!
Julian (aside): This little twit shall yet undo me quite!
Replace me in our father’s rheumy sight,
And get a Morris Minor for his pains,
The dirty swot! I say, chaps, what about
A game of harry cricket?
All: YES!
Timmy: Arf! Arf!
Enter cricket bag. Stumps are set up. Julian bowls the first ball to Dick, who smites it mightily.
Anne: See Timmy run! Run, Timmy, run! Oh, look!
He’s caught the ball between his teeth. Good dog!
Timmy: Arf! Arf! (Dies)
Dick: That ball! ’Tis poisoned! It was meant for me!
But what about this bat?
Julian: ’Tis poisoned, too!
Dick: Then have at thee, foul villain! Take thou that!
Julian: A poisoned off-drive! I am slain, alas! (Dies)
Dick: And so am I! Oh what a measly show! (Dies)
Flourish. Enter bearers. They bear the bodies and exeunt.
Georgina (weeps): Oh, world! The curse of thy eleven-plus!
Two brothers minus! Shall it aye be thus?
From THE POOH ALSO RISES
by Ernest Hemingway
It snowed hard that winter. It was the winter they all went up to the Front. You could get up early in the morning, if you were not wounded and forced to lie in your bed and look at the ceiling and wonder about the thing with the women, and you could see them going up to the Front, in the snow. When they walked in the snow, they left tracks, and after they had gone the snow would come down again and pretty soon the tracks would not be there any more. That is the way it is with snow.
Pooh did not go up to the Front that winter. Nor did he lie in bed and look at the ceiling, although last winter he had lain in bed and looked up at the ceiling, because that was the winter he had gone up to the Front and got his wound. It had snowed that winter, too.
This winter he could walk around. It was one of those wounds that left you able to walk around. It was one of those wounds that did not leave you much more.
Pooh got up and he went out into the snow and he went to see Piglet. Piglet had been one of the great ones, once. Piglet had been one of the poujadas, one of the endarillos, one of the nogales. He had been one of the greatest nogales there had ever been, but he was not one of the greatest nogales any more. He did not go up to the Front, either.
Piglet was sitting at his usual table, looking at an empty glass of enjarda.
‘I thought you were out,’ said Pooh.
‘No,’ said Piglet. ‘I was not out.’
‘You were thinking about the wound?’ said Pooh.
‘No,’ said Piglet. ‘I was not thinking about the wound. I do not think about the wound very much, any more.’
They watched them going up to the Front, in the snow.
‘We could go and see Eeyore,’ said Pooh.
‘Yes,’ said Piglet. ‘We could go and see Eeyore.’
They went out into the snow.
‘Do you hear the guns?’ said Pooh.
‘Yes,’ said Piglet. ‘I hear the guns.’
When they got to Eeyore’s house, he was looking at an empty glass of ortega. They used to make ortega by taking the new orreros out of the ground very early in the morning, before the dew had dried, and crushing them between the mantemagni, but they did not make it that way any more. Not since the fighting up at the Front.
‘Do you hear the guns?’ said Eeyore.
‘Yes,’ said Pooh. ‘I hear the guns.’
�
�It is still snowing,’ said Piglet.
‘Yes,’ said Eeyore. ‘That is the way it is.’
‘That is the way it is,’ said Pooh.
14
Ear, Believed Genuine Van Gogh,
Hardly Used, What Offers?
Next Tuesday, Sotheby’s are to auction a lock of Lord Byron’s hair.
The Times
I have a friend in Wells, Somerset, who has a hat belonging to Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Not, of course, as a result of a drunken post-prandial cock-up in some Victorian bistro in which Marx went off with Thackeray’s raincoat and Dickens hobbled away in Emily Bronte’s gumboots, but because of some astute, or some would say idiot, bidding at an Oxford sale some ten years ago.
The hat stands today on a small davenport in a house belonging to the Abbey National Building Society, whose financial acumen may be said to outstrip that of my friend. However, the hat is more of a talking-point than the house, I’ll give him that. It is, indeed, the only object of interest in the place. The first time I saw this moulting felt cylinder, the soft Somerset sunshine highlighting the moth-grubs feasting round its myriad holes, I said, quick as a flash, ‘What’s that?’
Normally, it is only in the cheaper women’s magazines that a glint may be said to come into a man’s eye. He may also have drawn in his breath with a faint hiss.
‘That’s Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s hat,’ he said. ‘He may well have been wearing it when the Great Eastern sank.’
We looked at it together, as if it bore some tangible sign of engineering history.
‘He may,’ said its new owner, ‘have taken it off to scratch his head while wondering—’
‘—if it was possible to throw an iron bridge across the River Dart?’
‘Exactly! Isn’t it marvellous?’
In a curious way, I suppose it was. It was concrete evidence that history was more than fiction – few people, I’m sure, really believe that men fought one another at Flodden with long sharp swords, without benefit of television, antibiotics, or man-made fibres. One requires three-dimensional reassurance of events that took place before one’s grandfather was born; that’s what’s good about Hampton Court Palace and Shakespeare folios. Here we were, in 1965, looking at Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s hat; no surer proof of his existence could have been offered. In its very ordinariness lay its honesty. That is probably why my friend, who has no interest in shipping, ironfounding, or, indeed, I.K. Brunel, bought it.
Of course, there are innumerable reasons why people turn over large wads of negotiable lettuce every day in return for some tatty fragment of arcane reliquiae. This is not to mention museums, whose spies forage the sale-rooms like agents of Dr. Frankenstein, looking for likely bits to enhance their Samuel Johnson house, or Great Plague Of London room, making a jigsaw of time for the benefit of parties of yawning schoolchildren who file past these precious morsels snatched back from mortality and inscribe ‘Norman Binns Form 3a 1970’ on the escritoire at which Castlereagh blew most of his brains out. But museums apart, the list of reasons for which citizens rip out cheques in return for items of no intrinsic value must be endless, from the interior-decorating philistine – ‘You know what the corner needs to pick up the Regency motif, Mrs. Greebs-Wibley? It needs the Duke of Wellington’s bidet, that’s what it needs, with a rubber-plant in it, and possibly a nice skull, comme mémoire du Diable’ – to the intoxicated near-necrophiliac, who sits all day in Che Guevara’s socks, weeping for gone glory and decomposing heroes. It may be that the lock of Byron’s hair, unsold at the time of going to press, will be knocked down to one such fan, if the University of Texas doesn’t get there first, because the God of Romanticism left countless worshippers to pass the bitter-sweet message on to succeeding generations: the old ladies rocking themselves back and forth on chintz upholstery, murmuring cantos of Don Juan and imagining themselves taken, firmly but tenderly, on the incense-smelling carpet of Lord B’s Venetian bed-sitter, may look more respectable than the teeny-boppers who stuff each new Buddy Holly posthumous LP beneath their pillows, but they’re no less potty. If the lock of hair has gone to one of them, it can count itself lucky: it’s all velvet cushions and fond kisses from now on. If it’s been snapped up by a male fan, it’s in for a rougher time, and may well end up sellotaped to his forehead, being regularly tugged for inspiration as he paces back and forth in his carefully ruined Hampstead attic trying to find a rhyme for ‘mat’.
Mind you, it may well have been bought by the time you read this, and if you’re still listening, by a spry merchant bank, or Save-And-Prosper Unit Trust, something like that, with an eye to the main chance and a shrewd investment. Who knows what it might fetch in fifty years’ time, split up, say, into one-hair lots to avoid the penalty of capital gains? There’s always the chance, of course, that Byron may fall from favour and interest, or that the entire opus will turn out to have been written by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and published under an assumed name to avoid accusations of frivolity being levelled at a man who was trying to drum up money for his Channel Tunnel project (which would bang up the value of his hat overnight), but that’s the investment game for you. Personally, I’d go a bundle on Byron hair, whatever the Financial Times thinks: look at the case of Mahomet – his most Holy Relic is a mere two inches of one beard-hair, over which wars have been fought on a number of occasions. If you’d been wise enough to have bought that during the slack period, in around AD 600 and before he’d made a name for himself, you’d have more than money today. You’d have eight hundred million Muslims ready to follow you anywhere.
And that, friends, is the nub and crux. It’s the case of Poseidon shares all over again – the world must be full of citizens kicking themselves for not having snapped up relics when the price was rock-bottom, only to see them soaring through the charts and turning canny paupers to lonely millionaires at the touch of a gavel. Sadly, as with so much else about history’s heroes, it’s the spotting of potential fame that’s the difficulty, whether it’s publishing their poems, or hanging their paintings, or buying their old underwear. Think of the great men whose lives passed in penury and hacking coughs due to public unawareness that their littlest possession would one day end up in Sotheby’s or the basement of Fort Knox. Imagine poor I.K. Brunel, at the depth of his fortunes after the Great Eastern had gone down like a tin brick, rushing into a Burlington Arcade antiquerie with a brown-paper parcel and muttering ‘Do you a very nice hat, brother, fraught with history, monogrammed inside, worn throughout the period I was inventing the watertight bulkhead?’ What sort of response do you suppose that would have evoked, if not an assistant manager’s boot up the backside of a pair of breeches which, had the fool realised it, would today be worth twice as much as the hat? And what of Byron, stuck in the middle of Childe Harold and the bailiffs about to carry off his quill? How would he have fared, had he attempted to put his sideburns on the market? Given his reputation at the time, terror of catching something off the precious locks would have had the floorwalkers shrieking for the Bow Street Runners in nought seconds flat, who’d have chucked the shorn bard into a small dark room and thrown the key into the Thames.
Those of you who know me will by now, I think, have cottoned on to this matchless drift. Mine is no mere idle reflection on fame, or hair. Things have been a shade dodgy lately, what with the second instalment of Schedule D for the tax year 72–73 already overdue, and the Inland Revenue poised at the drop of a summons to distrain upon my chattels, so I’d like to let you in on the ground floor. Offer you an unprecedented chance to cash in on what, after the worms sit burping around my supine dust, will be a reputation fit to keep the encyclopaedia-writers in work for years and force the sale-rooms to take on whole armies of extra staff. Why wait for prices to boom beyond reach? Why fiddle around with building society deposits at five per cent after tax, when you could own a Coren shirt today, actually worn while this article (or, as it will later be known, British Museum MS 68854/ac) was being written, or a matched pair of Coren
boots, as originally issued to Genuine Naval Officers, but now weighing down the feet of one of the greatest reputations which will ever be made?
The author will be signing vests at Austin Reed, Regent Street, between 10 and 5.30, weekdays only. Don’t be late: the first edition is limited to 500 only.
15
Father’s Lib
The City University of New York has offered its male staff paternity leave on the same terms as female staff get maternity leave. It is believed to be the first time such a provision has been offered in an American labour contract.
The Times
There are a number of things that are going to be wrong with this piece.
Some of them will be noticeable – a certain sogginess here and there; a tendency, uncharacteristic in the author, to use one word where two would normally do; arguments, if you can call them that, which start, falter, then peter emptily out; odd bits of disconnected filler, such as laundry lists, a reader’s letter or two, notes from the inside cover of my driving licence, a transcript of my tailor’s label; that sort of thing.
There will be phrases like ‘that sort of thing’.
Some of the things that are going to be wrong will not be noticeable – the fact that the writer has a tendency to fall off his chair between paragraphs; to knock his coffee into his desk drawer; to rip the trapped ribbon from his typewriter and tear it to shreds, moaning and oathing; to wake up with a start to find the impression 1QA”ZWS/XED @ CRF£V on his forehead where it has fallen into the keys; to light a cigarette while one is still ticking over in the ashtray; to stop dead, wondering where his next syllable is coming from.
Nor will you notice, since the typographer, sturdy lad, will be backing up the young author like a seasoned RSM shoring a pubescent subaltern before Mons, that a good half of the words are misspelled, if there are two ‘s’s’ in ‘misspelled’, that is; and if it shouldn’t be ‘mis(s)pelt’, anyway.
I’m glad that sentence is over; if it was a sentence. Was there a verb there?
But, for once, ineptitude will be its own defence; inadequacy its own argument. The very fact that readers this week are about to receive (have, indeed, already in part received) a substandard article with the tacks showing and the sawdust trickling out the back only proves the writer’s thesis: which is that the concept of paternity leave has been a long time a-coming. That it has come to the United States, pioneer of the ring-pull can, automatic transmission, monosodium glutamate, the Sidewinder missile, and sundry other humanitarian breakthroughs should be no surprise to anyone; what is grievous is that there is little sign that the blessed concession is to be adopted on this side of the Atlantic.
