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Don’t delay, e-mail today, to syd@briefencounters.co.uk
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A Nose By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet
I HAVE just spent several days looking for a new nose. Do not, however, jump to cruel conclusions about the webhunting of cosmetic rhinopractors: a glance at my back-flap mugshot, if you can bear it, should quickly tell you that a new nose wouldn’t help; nothing short of a whole head replacement could sort things out, so until the window-boxes of Harley Street are in a position to offer a full range of fetching transplantables waving on genetically modified sunflower stalks and awaiting the open chequebooks of the vain, I fear I shall be forced to stick with what Mother Nature delivered to Mother Coren. The new nose I was looking for was not for me, but for Aphrodite.
It had to be a very small nose, mind, for she is a very small Aphrodite. A pocket Venus. She is only three feet tall, though terribly attractive, if you like conkless women, and I picked her up at a country sale a week ago for a knockdown price, probably because she had at some point in her statuary career been knocked down, leaving her nose where she fell. I do not know where that was, otherwise I should go round and look for it, even though the likelihood is that the nose is no longer there: it would have been a pretty nose, I imagine, given that its owner is the goddess of beauty, so someone coming across it, wherever it was that it lay bodiless, would have been bound to pocket it and take it home to put on the mantelpiece. Then again, if all this happened a long time ago, and the finder were a toff, it might well have ended up on his watch-chain; it would be an interesting talking point, should you run out of things to say about Home Rule or the new Trollope, and it would make small grandchildren giggle whenever you plucked it out of your waistcoat pocket and swung it.
Anyway, wherever the nose is now, it wasn’t on the little stone coquette I ported home from Wiltshire to put in my garden. Mrs Coren insisted this didn’t matter, distress was part of its charm, not to mention its mystery, look at the Sphinx, but my view was that a statue designed to celebrate feminine perfection wasn’t doing its job if it appeared to have gone three rounds with Mike Tyson, and as far as mystery was concerned, I would rather not have people coming into my garden and saying what’s that, why’s it got no nose, does it do riddles?
So I turned, as I invariably do when the chips are down (and this being, for once, quite literally the case) to the Yellow Pages, to find, astonishingly, that there was nothing between non-ferrous metals and notaries. Which drove me and my PC into the hands of Google, Sherlock and Jeeves – who could easily be a firm of notaries but are in fact discrete search engines – and when I tell you that though between them they came up with umpteen entries for nose, many so extravagantly repellent that I shall never again be able to look into a handkerchief without fear and trembling, none of them had the faintest idea of where I might get hold of a stone one. Jeeves, to be fair, did shimmer in with long lists of both stonemasons and sculpture restorers, but it didn’t take many phone calls to discover that no mason was prepared to unsheath his chisel for anything so titchy, and that the only way to get a restorer to give you a nose was to give him an arm and a leg.
So, yesterday, I decided to build one. I stood Aphrodite on the garden table so that our faces were of a height, I mixed the Polyfilla to the prescribed formula, I pressed the lump to the stump, and while it was still pliable, I shaped it with care and, yes, love. You will say, that was a tad risky, remember Pygmalion, Mrs Coren would not take kindly to coming out into the garden and discovering that you had fallen head-over-heels for a Greek midget, but you are wrong; when Mrs Coren came into the garden, what she said was: ‘What is the Duke of Wellington doing on the table?’ So I tried to tweak a bit off the end of the nose, but it wasn’t pliable any more, it was crumbly, and I had to start again, this time moulding a selection of noses, retrousse, button, flared, something I’d spotted on Jennifer Lopez, but let me tell you it isn’t easy, you get the nose right and then try to poke nostrils in with a twig and the whole thing suddenly goes bulbous, you are looking at Sid James, but I managed it, finally, and I carried Aphrodite to a shady spot beneath an apple tree. Where her nose soon dried to – Mrs Coren helpfully pointed out – a slightly different colour from her head.
‘It’ll weather in’, I said.
But it didn’t. It weathered off. Either that, or a bird stood on it. When we looked out this morning, Aphrodite and her nose were side by side. ‘Not exactly aphrodisiac, is it?’ I said. ‘Shall I bin it?’ ‘No,’ said Mrs Coren, ‘look on the bright side. It’s a terrific memento mori.’
Regime Change
COUNTLESS workaholic readers with no time for gyms or marathons have e-mailed me following Monday’s mould-breaking news from applied physiologist Professor Martin Gibala that all a 24/7 nose-grinder needs to achieve tip-top fitness is just two minutes a day using either a cycling machine or a folding bike kept in the boot of the car. They want to know if this regime really works. It does. I have been there.
Here you are, driving to the office. Too often, busy-busy people like you make the car an excuse for letting up on exercise, but trust me, umpteen opportunities abound for working out that flabby old body of yours as you drive. First, keep a constant eye open for fitness freaks who have already unfolded their bicycles: they will, as part of their workout, overtake you on the inside, shoot across you on the red light, cut in without signalling, spit, scream, give you the finger, and bang their fists on your roof. Do not let them outfitness you: jam on your brakes (firming up ankles), grip the wheel until your fingers go white (shedding unsightly knuckle-fat), scream back even more hysterically (toning up wattle-necks), give them two fingers to their one (strengthening digital sinew), and bang your own fist on the dashboard (accelerating heart-rate and dislodging dangerous platelets).
Next, try to text your congestion-charge number: 500 rapid press-ups will give you a thumb of iron, and, since you still cannot get through, hurling your cellphone out of the window will boost wrist-sinew, especially if, in your invaluable cholesterol-thinning rage, you have forgotten to open it, allowing the cellphone to bounce back onto the rear seat, compelling groping and flailing just great for arms, neck and shoulders.
Nearing your office, be sure to take advantage of the fact that the congestion charge doesn’t work: park a mile away, remove your folding bicycle from the boot, and attempt to put it together. I have frequently found that throwing a partly assembled folding bicycle into the road and screaming as you jump up and down on it gets the whole body working. You can feel it in your temples. Now you have broken it, you are in a splendid position to jog – carrying your muscle-building briefcase, lap-top, overcoat, umbrella, and gunny-sack of healthy lunch-time yak-yoghurt and fibrous growths from more than one country of origin – to the nearest department store, to buy a cycling machine instead.
> Once there, and the sweat has dried from pores so healthily opened you can poke a pencil through them, remember to take the lift, NOT the stairs. It’s a mistake so many keep-fit fanatics make: stairs will strengthen only adipose legs and hips, but a lift which insists on going up when you pressed down, ensures that you are stuck behind three women with pushchairs and a man with a new garden bench when the doors eventually open at your floor but shut again before you can push through, and may even, with any luck, pack up altogether between floors, will enable you to jump up and down, wave your arms about, bang on the doors, fall to your knees, open all those lucky pores again, and, most important, get those sluggish lungs and heart of yours working overtime, never mind toughening your bladder no end.
You will need the lift because, having asked on the ground floor if they sell exercise bikes, you will be directed to the enquiry desk on the top floor, who will advise you try the sports department in the basement, where everyone will be (a) off sick with RSI, (b) seeing their lawyer about the till which caused it, (c) on maternity leave, or (d) taking a counselling break – with the sole exception of a Finn brought up in Taiwan, the battery of whose hearing-aid has just gone flat. You will both run around for a while, pulling out croquet sets and fishing rods and ping-pong bats, until his colleague returns from counselling and, summoning all the English you would expect from a Chinese brought up in Finland, directs you to the fifth floor. Which will turn out to be Ye Olde Nigella Burger Bar and Staff Infirmary, where a fist-faced matron will send you back to the enquiry desk in the attic.
Great, or what? Having galloped many a mile, shed many a kilo, and fettled everything attached to your skeleton and hanging inside it, don’t you feel fighting fit? Now do something for someone else: buy the bike and take it to the office, so your mates can see it. Laughter is the best medicine.
On A Wing And A Prayer
LOUIS Bleriot; Charles Lindbergh; Douglas Bader; Guy Gibson; the Red Coren. Every generation has one. Welcome aboard, this is your ace speaking. We shall be flying at 30,000 feet at a speed of 550 mph, just as soon as the kid stops screaming. Until the kid stops screaming, we have no way of knowing if the engines are working. For your information, the engines on this Boeing 767 are RR RB 211-524Hs. Rolls-Royce are very proud of them: at 550 mph all you can hear is the ticking of the clock. Unless the kid is screaming. If the kid is screaming, you couldn’t hear Big Ben.
The kid is across the aisle from me, in an ordinary seat. I am in a very special seat. Not only is it very special, it is also very important. It is what we flying aces call the bulkhead exit seat. It has more leg room than ordinary economy seats, it has more leg room than club class seats, that is why we flying aces always check in by telephone before we fly, but that is not what makes it important. What makes it important is that in the event of an emergency, we aces have to do the thing with the big handle that opens the emergency door, and we have to help with the chute; we have to make sure passengers have removed their high heels, spectacles, and teeth, and, if they have a thing about sharks and do not want to go down the chute, we have to throw them out. If sharks do turn up, we have to dive in and knock them about. That is why we have to be fit: when we check in, the deskman on the telephone asks us how fit we are. We tell him terrifically fit: like well-oiled machines – which we intend to be as soon as the booze trolley comes round, that is one of the reasons we need the extra leg room, we want to stretch out and zizz after we have drunk the trolley – we rattle off our pulse-rate, blood pressure, cholesterol level, body mass index, glucose tolerance, hearing/vision factors, press-ups per day, all that. Fit or what?
So then, Sunday night, Nice airport, soft damson sunset over the adjacent Med, the Boeing has taxied to its take-off point, the stewardess is about to do the emergency drill, and the kid is smiling happily beside his, I guess, daddy. He is two years old, and he is an angel: he looks like Millais’ Bubbles. Pears soap wouldn’t melt in his mouth. At this point the stewardess snaps open the yellow life jacket, slips it on, and sticks the oxygen mask over her face. And the kid goes crazy. No kid ever screamed like it. No adult ever screamed like it. He is only a small kid, but his body must be made up entirely of tonsil. Never mind not hearing the engines, if the kid doesn’t stop screaming soon the windows will shatter. The tyres will burst. The electronics will fuse. Alerted fire-tenders and anti-terrorist APCs will come clanging and howling towards us – though we shall, of course, not be able to hear them. The stewardess is staring at the kid, the kid is shrieking at the stewardess, and economy passengers fore and aft are straining in their seat belts to try to clock what’s happening: could be an ullulating fundamentalist about to claim his six dozen virgins, could be a turbine blade shearing through an engine, could be a shark attack – maybe they’re getting bolder, like foxes, hurtling out of the Baie des Anges, who knows? – could be anything, this is 2007 and this is a plane. I glance past the stewardess at the club class curtain; it is trembling. Rich people up front, free caviare, free foie gras, have no inkling what might be happening back here: are the poor people, no free caviare, no free foie gras, eating a kid?
The kid’s daddy is distraught. He picks up the kid, but it is like picking up a dervish octopus, the kid is flailing, a left hook, a right jab, teeth, flying snot, the yellow-jacketed stewardess steps towards them, the tonsils go up to warp-factor decibels, the fuselage might crack . . . and it is at this point that the ace intervenes. This is his moment: it is for this that not only all his fitness has prepared him, but also his incomparable savvy. He tells the stewardess that it is the yellow jacket which has detonated the kid. She takes it off, but the kid does not stop screaming, he is not fooled, there is a monster aboard, this is a fee-fi-fo-fum moment, but the ace is not fazed, he has a trump left to play before push comes to shove and he has to open the door and fire the kid down the shute. He tells the stewardess to blow her whistle. The stewardess frowns. You know how to whistle, don’t you, says the ace, you put your lips together and you blow into that thing dangling from the life jacket. The stewardess replies that this is only for emergencies, but the ace – fit, cool, authorative – says: what do you think this is?
So she picks up the whistle, and blows. It is a hell of whistle: the kid stops. He has met his match. It is all over. The plane takes off. The ace settles back into the special seat he was born to fill. Eat his shorts, Biggles.
Chocs Away
TOMORROW is a major day. It is the last day of an era. The midnight chimes which gong on May 1 will herald a watershed between romance and lust. I know this, because Nestlé tells me so. They have clearly chosen their day with much forethought: May 1 has been a watershed between romance and lust since time immoral, for it is the day when maidens wake up to deck themselves with flowers and dance around a tall signifier designed to ensure that as soon as they have finished dancing they will be chased giggling into the long grass and comprehensively undecked.
Now, Nestlé make a signifier, too, albeit not so tall. Just six inches. It is built by stacking 11 circular chocolate-covered caramels on top of one another. Here is a press release about it: ‘Rolo’s famous chocolate slogan of ‘Do you love anyone enough to give them your last Rolo?’ is being axed after 23 years because makers Nestlé think it too romantic to reflect modern relationships. It will be replaced on May 1 by advertisements in which an office girl flashes her underwear to get one of the sweets, because Nestlé research shows that romance is not the most important thing in a modern relationship. It’s time to move on.’
Time to move on whom is not of course specified, but we can be sure it will not stop at office girls. If Nestlé has its marketing strategy in line, you may be confident that, after May 1, the sassy female spectrum from Ulrika Johnsson to Margaret Beckett will be leaning fetchingly against the water-cooler, murmuring: ‘Is that a tube of Rolo in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’ You may be sure, too, that there will be equally naff observations from the lads along the lines of: ‘The trouble with a tube of Ro
lo is that after you give her one, it gets smaller.’ You know how people are, these days.
But you also know me, and you will therefore know that I am a little uneasy about all this, not least (pretend I care) on Nestlé’s behalf. The exchange of chocolates for women may have an ancient provenance, but I surely cannot be alone in finding it somewhat iffy. It can so easily backfire. In the romantic lang syne, when it was a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a box of Black Magic must be in want of a wife, I fell in love with great regularity. In consequence, even in my teens, I was frequently to be found sliding five bob across the Woollies’ confectionery counter in the hope of securing, later that same day, the first Mrs Coren. I was not after anything else: picture me as that sad jerk in a black jumpsuit who used to parachute onto the north face of the Eiger, abseil down through a thunderstorm, swim across the icy lake at the bottom, break and enter a lakeside house via the bedroom window, leave a little carton on a bedside table, and then, in major italics, clear off again, without even looking in the bed to see if he could learn something to his advantage. All because the lady loved Milk Tray. And, subtextually, all because she was a lady. Leaving us to assume that, after he had delivered the requisite number of chocolates and had a word with her father, she married him.
I did a lot of that, in my search for romance, not so much in the Alps as in the Southgate Odeon – a spot no less hazardous if, for example, all you could afford that week was Maltesers, which, lovingly placed in the lap beside you, could easily, if its new owner was startled, say, by a hand suddenly clamping her far shoulder, fly off and send its contents rolling down to the front. You got blamed for that. You often walked home alone. Worse yet, I fell deeply in love with a number of future Mrs Corens in tooth-braces, several of whom got bits of hazelnut cluster lodged in their canines, to the terminal detriment of advanced kissing. More than once, too, I would reach out romantically for a hand that already had half an unwanted coffee-creme in it. From which you will understand when I say that bartering chocolates for wives, even in those pre-feminist days, wasn’t all that the advertisers cracked it up to be. (Just as, a little later, I was to discover what a scam candle-lit dinners were: fine at the start, when the candles were tall, but as they burned down to below chin height, the person opposite you turned into an uplit ghost train ghoul. Also, your nostrils had to be spotless.)