69 for 1

by Alan Coren

  Miss Pyke has opened a can of worms, especially for anyone who got married a good three years before her hairdryer was even a twinkle in her grannie’s eye. I don’t know what she opened it with, but I bet it wasn’t a 43-year-old wall-mounted electric can opener. Certainly not one that has been wall-remounted six times, as you can see from the Polyfilled holes in the wall it is mounted on. Mrs Coren and I still use this wedding present, when we want to open a tin which falls off the can opener as soon as the tin has been half opened, because, after 43 loyal years, its magnet is poignantly feeble. No matter, we have trained ourselves to catch it as it falls, just an inch or so before it hits the Kenwood food mixer which stand beneath it.

  The Kenwood is the same age, and we love it. I know when Mrs Coren is making a cake even when I am working four floors above, because the bowl is dented and the mixing-hook wonky, and I find that the rhythmic clunking interrupts my work hardly at all. The cakes turn out very well, too. ‘How’s the sponge?’ Mrs Coren will ask. ‘Wonderfully lumpy,’ I reply. ‘Just the way I like it.’

  The mixer came, of course, with a blender. We can still get the blender to fit on top of it with only the smallest of hammers. That the stopper which fits almost totally into the lid has to be held on while the blades are whirling is a great boon: to tell whether any more seasoning is required, you simply lick the soup out of your palm.

  And just look at the kitchen telephone. It has a dial. It was in the house when we bought it, and we both cried: ‘Retro!’ as soon as we saw it, for that is the kind of people we are. We love using it: dialling introduces a soothing deceleration to the hectic times we live in, and the inevitable misdialling with soupy fingers is even better: you meet so many interesting new people. It is also, of course, attached to the wall by a plaited cord, so cannot be snatched by villains. They would have to pull the whole house after them.

  And my own hairdryer? Bought in Oxford a full ten years before Ginette’s grannie dug into her purse, it ran very hot, vital for a full head of hair. But that it now runs barely lukewarm no longer matters: indeed, as the globe boils up, cooling a hairless dome will be essential in the sultry days ahead.

  Now, shall we re-descend to the kitchen? I have something fabulous to show you. These seven toasters give us endless hours of . . .

  Good G*lly!

  THOSE of you reading this propped against the teapot – this, not you – may find some of its words obscured by sticky blobs. That can happen to books. It may, though, not happen for very much longer. The marmalade industry is dying. The future is not bright. It is not orange.

  The reason, claimed a spokesperson, is that children no longer like marmalade, and discourage their parents from buying it. Nothing could be further from the truth; but that is where the truth has been banished, because the spokesperson couldn’t speak it. Had he spoken it, a certain word would have been inescapably involved, and people would have come round to the spokesperson’s house and sprayed nasty things on it.

  For the truth is that children never liked marmalade, but encouraged their parents to buy it. At least, they encouraged them to buy the top-sellers, Robertson’s Golden Shred and Silver Shred, because of what the jars had on their labels. And here comes the word, albeit in a form designed to appease those who would otherwise reach for their aerosols and run straight round to The Times: what the jars had on their labels were g*ll*w*gs. They could be cut out by children who, when they had collected five of them, would send them off to Robertson’s and get back an enamel g*ll*w*g brooch.

  There was a huge variety of enamel g*ll*w*gs. I myself had three: one held a cricket bat, one held a rifle, and one, dear God, actually held a banjo. I was quite young at the time, mind, as people of my age tended to be 60 years ago, and I pinned all three g*ll*w*gs on my Osidge Primary School blazer lapel, which is what people of my age did. David Collingwood had five, and when the rest of us saw him coming, we stepped aside. Respect meant something rather different, back then.

  But none of us liked marmalade; we just forced it down pluckily, or threw the jars away when our mums weren’t looking, or, like Michael Ibbotson in 4a, shoplifted it from the Co-op, just for the labels. Robertson’s had struck a gold, and silver, seam. Until, of course, consciousness changed.

  I have never fully understood why it did, because the g*ll*w*g was the best-loved stuffed toy ever. It may, I suppose, have been something to do with the last syllable, but you would be wrong to castigate it as w*g, since the word was invented in 1895 by an American author called Upton, who conflated it from God and pollywog. A pollywog is a tadpole. You know what God is. And together, they can’t half sell jamjars.

  But if, to save moribund marmalade, it is too late to bring the g*ll*w*g back, I see no reason why producers shouldn’t come up with new cross-culturally inclusive alternatives: little rabbis blowing bagpipes, say, little imams scaling maypoles, little fakirs chucking boomerangs, little popes on tricycles, and whatever else takes this or that sectarian fancy.

  There should even be room for little ballerinas waving swastikas.

  Manifold Pressures

  FIFTY years ago this week, I raised my hand to ask Mr Milward if I might be excused, I walked out of the classroom, I put on my school cap, and I took the 29 bus to my appointment with the most important man in the world. And there he was, sitting in a bottle-green Austin A35. Not in the driving seat, of course, because that was where I was going to sit; so I did, and I checked the mirror and I started the engine and I drove off behind a flappy L-plate; and when I drove back, half an hour later, the most important man in the world took off the L-plate and shook my hand.

  How literal can a rite of passage get? Nor had it made me merely a man; it had made me a free one, with a free world, palpably, at my feet: bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to have three pedals was very heaven. I could go anywhere, much of the anywhere at any speed, and no one would know where I or the anywhere was, and when I got to it, I could park anywhere in it, free. And not only could I drive any old car to do this in, I could drive every old car, there being no MOT test, so I bought a Morris 10/4 much older than I was, not because of pubescent yearning for a mature partner, but because she was anybody’s for a tenner.

  Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, eh? Let me turn from my keyboard now, half a century on, and stare at the car below my window. Though she is much younger than I am, and cost rather more than a tenner, under the window is where she spends 99 per cent of her time. If I drive her half a mile south to buy a paper, it will cost me £8 for congestive affrontery, plus £50 for not galloping back the further half-mile I had to drive to the only £5 parking meter I could find faster than the three Westminster sprinters who are racing me to her. The record of all this activity will be held at CCTV House, so that the Chief Constable will know where I have been, and how, and why, and also be able gleefully to pass the DVD on to the Department for Jailing People Who Fasten Their Seatbelts After Moving Off.

  If rage-fuelled incaution makes me drive my £63 newspaper home at 30.1 mph, worse may happen: road humps may dislodge my bridgework, a MET helicopter report me for whizzing past Regent’s Park mosque in a manner likely to unnerve armed response units secreted in the shrubbery, and a beak fine me £500 and shred my licence. Probably on the day my car is clamped outside my dentist’s surgery. Or towed away from it.

  Do not ask if I ever drive out of London to go and live in a motorway jam, rather ask how happy I am to contribute to the £62 billion required to set up a pay-as-you-go system for the mugs who do. And since, in my 50 years of driving to the Moon and back, things only ever got worse, how long can it be before just staring at the car below my window brings an ASBO to my mat?

  I sometimes wonder whether, if Mr Milward had said in 1957 that I couldn’t be excused, I wouldn’t be a happier man today.

  Chinese Puzzle

  OH, really, Secretary of State? Mandarin, you say? Can you say it in Mandarin? Ah. Nevertheless, you, as Education Education Educati
on Secretary, have cheerily expressed your expectation that, by 2012, when the Chinese athletes arrive at the Olympic Village, lots of Britons will be able to chat with them. Asked the way to the nearest Nandrilone r Us, our children will be in a position to give detailed directions, without pointing.

  Urn. Do you know how many teachers of French there are in Britain? Yes, you do, because I have just phoned your Department, and they know, so I know that you know. There are 23,000. Teachers of Mandarin? 78. Something of a task ahead, then, if pupils are to drop French in favour of Mandarin: you will have to find 22,922 Mandarin beaks pretty sharpish.

  But first things first, because that is the way education works. Of the 200,000 children soon to take GCSE French, do you know how many will end up able to chat to French people in it? 12. Only an educated guess, I admit – guesswork was my core curriculum – but I spend a lot of time in France, where I see a lot of Britons, most of them middle class and therefore middle-educated in French, and do you know what I see them doing? Shouting and gesticulating. They are not doing it to pass themselves off as French, they are doing it because they can’t. If they need something for the weekend, the only word the shopkeeper will recognise is weekend; he will have to rely on sign language to work out what the something is.

  I do not know why, when their own language is so complicated, Britons find simpler languages impossible, but has it not struck the Education Secretary that Mandarin might prove a little tricky? To start with the alphabet, you can’t: there isn’t one. Where you start is with the first of 50 thousand different characters. Since each can be pronounced in four different ways to articulate four different meanings, we arrive once more at the figure of 200,000: in other words, as it were, if each of the pupils currently struggling to learn French were to learn instead one different Mandarin word each by 2012 (a big ask, I promise) they would all have to turn up in the Olympic Village if Britain is – how did the Secretary of State put it? – ‘to raise our game, in order to compete in an increasingly globalised economy.’

  To which end he has a further vision, some might say one even more Olympian, of Britons flocking by slow boat to China to buy, to sell, to holiday, to settle, doing it all in fluent Mandarin. Oo-er. Given that globetrotting Britons never use any accent but their own, even that extraordinary handful who have managed to learn a few Mandarin words will have been unable to master the requisite ten tones: they will ask the way to the terracotta army, and find themselves ordering double glazing.

  Nor is shouting and gesticulating advisable: remember that chap who tried it in Tiananmen Square? They drove a tank over him.

  Trick Questions

  OH, look, there is a new Home Office initiative. Unless, by the time this book gets to press, the editors will have corrected that to New Home Office initiative; since that is what we might well, by tomorrow, have, given the volatility of events in Marsham Street. (Note to any out-of-touch editors: I am not wrong, Marsham Street is the new address for the old Home Office. The old Home Office moved there last year from Queen Anne’s Gate. They did that following a new initiative which declared that the old Home Office was sick and tired of genderist puns about the way one of our beloved sovereigns (1707–1714) found herself walking after 22 pregnancies.

  And if you think: thank God, that is today’s bit of silliness out of the way, you are mistaken. We have not got to the new New Home Office initiative yet. This is a plan to embed X-ray cameras into the nation’s lamp-posts to enable your great Home Secretary to clock terrorists who are carrying bombs in their underwear.

  Though I have many doubts about how far this plan carries the nation forward, I have none at all about how far it carries me back. When I was a boy, it was impossible to buy a comic which did not contain an advertisement for X-ray spectacles. It was aimed at boys who hitherto could only dream of having Superman’s X-ray eyes, which they felt to be utterly wasted on Superman, because he never used them to look at women, this being incompatible with truth, justice, and the American way. For our part, we felt it to be totally compatible with the British way, just to uncover the truth about women. So we all sent off five-bob postal orders.

  What came back were so opaque that not only could you not see things you couldn’t previously see, you couldn’t see things you previously could. Many of my generation still bear the scars left by pillar boxes. Though not Gerald Finch: he refused to cough up five bob on the grounds that even if the glasses worked, you would only see Brenda Taylor’s bones anyway.

  What is clear to me today, however, is that John Reid has been thinking about this for 50 years. I do not know for which minutia of economic history he got his PhD, but it wouldn’t at all surprise me to learn that it was the commercial structure of the comic book, not only because so many of his policies patently reflect his early reading, but also because you have only to glance at him to realise that he has modelled himself on Desperate Dan.

  That he is growing more desperate with every passing day is surely reflected in the new X-ray initiative. God knows what the Home Office will come up with next, though I recall that the Seebackoscope, enabling you to spot any terrorists following you, was a snip at half a crown. But, given fully booked cells and the judiciary’s enmity towards Dr Reid, how will terrorists be punished? Sentenced to a sprinkling of itching powder, probably.

  Animal Crackers

  READING at the weekend that the railings around London Zoo were too low to keep in any animals which escaped from their cages, I was of course thrilled. Because I immediately conflated this news with thoughts of mink, parakeets, and global warming, to arrive at the exciting conclusion that when, any minute now, the Zoo’s inmates become outmates, Derwent May’s captivating Nature Notes for The Times will probably read somewhat differently . . .

  As the days of spring grow ever balmier, many of you will wake to the unmistakeable sound of your bedroom windows being licked. Slowly drawing back the curtains to avoid startling, you will find yourself eye to eye with a large head. You will be able to identify the animal by its distinct orange markings and the fact that you sleep on the third floor. It is a giraffe. It will almost certainly have another giraffe standing beside it, for this is the season when they are searching for somewhere to mate. My advice is to tiptoe downstairs and move the car to a safe place.

  Now is the time when, in Tescos all across the land, you may expect to see short ginger customers jumping up and down in the six-items-or-less queues. Orangutans are impatient creatures, who, should the checkout lady summon a supervisor to query the correct accounting of a bunch of bananas half-eaten en route to the till, may begin throwing trolleys. It is wise not to remonstrate, lest the customer turn his attention to throwing you.

  As the hedgerows commence their lush seasonal burgeoning, be especially cautious when plucking wild flowers therefrom. The sinuous tendril you gently ease aside may well be a black mamba, that spry little chappie whose clever camouflage is not his only fascinating feature: the venom of one particularly feisty example is recorded as having once accounted for an entire platoon of Gurkhas, much to the relief of a beleagured Japanese gun crew who had been about to chuck themselves on their own bayonets.

  Similarly, with the trout season happily upon us, take particular care when casting for the plump speckled fellow lurking beside a floating log. The log could be out of there in a trice and have your leg off before you know it.

  On a closing note, many readers have e-mailed me to express fears that our domestic cats may be threatened by all the ocelots, lynxes, servals and so forth which have escaped into the wild, and enthusiastically bred (an Uxbridge gentleman has written to say that the nocturnal racket has made his wife stone deaf in one ear). The answer is, I’m afraid, that not only will some of our British cats be killed, but also that others may be, how shall I put it, compromised. If you find that your own dear tabby has given birth to kittens able to slice open a tin of Whiskas with a single swipe of their claw, I urge you to seek professional advice at your earliest convenience
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  Plug Ugly

  JUNE 6. No coincidence there, then. But I am writing this on D-Day minus 1: I do not know what tomorrow will bring. I know what it is supposed to be bringing. I have been anticipating it for a very long time, the planning has been meticulous, the preparation exemplary; and yet, once what tomorrow is bringing is brought, who can guess what it will bring with it? Planning and preparation can go only so far. That is how it is with D-days.

  I have known for months that June 6 would be Delivery Day. Mrs Coren has it in writing. That is because it was all Mrs Coren’s idea. She wants the world to be a better place. Especially for her, which is why she spent so much time and effort and money on getting the box fitted to our front wall. And the thing inside the box. The thing has to be inside a box, and the box has to have a lock on it, because you have to stop people stealing what is coming into the thing. For the thing inside the box is a plug, and what is coming into it is electricity.

  Why would people want to steal the Corens’ electricity? To run their electric car. If the plug were not inside a locked box, when our electric car is not plugged into it but pottering about on the electricity from which it is now unplugged, anyone could come along and plug their own car in. Hang on, you say, you have not got an electric car. Wrong: it is being delivered on June 6. By the time you read this, Mrs Coren will have plugged it in, and I shall be staring at it.

  I know what I shall see. Go to www.goinggreen.co.uk and you can see it, too. It is called a G-Wiz. That there is something of the cartoon about its name doesn’t stop there. Noddy would love it: otherwise indistinguishable from his, this one has a roof. Mrs Coren tells me it will save congestion charges, parking meter fees, petrol costs, insurance payments, road tax, and the planet. In that order. She tells me this while I am staring at it.