69 for 1

by Alan Coren

  Because the chicken had always been man’s best friend. This was admittedly something of a one-way street, since in order to demonstrate her friendship the chicken had first to give up her babies for scrambling, then herself to be throttled, plucked, drawn, quartered, roasted, and eaten, finally submitting to the friendliest gesture of all: getting her sucked-clean furcula snapped in half to grant the luckier of her last two friends a wish. As if that were not enough, the loving bond between man and bird continued beyond the grave: man, praying that mortality might not be the end, looked at his dear departed’s bones, took stock, and the chicken came back as soup.

  But all that is over, now. The worm has turned; and though we may all be shaken that it has suddenly turned so utterly, it’s pretty clear that it was the absence of turned worms that started it. For once man had worked out that he might benefit even more from the friendship by depriving the chicken not only of wriggling organic tucker but also of fresh air, sunlight and free range sex, and banging her up in concentration camps to be force fed on a broad range of industrial delicacies to both stimulate her growth and circumscribe her lust, the worm that turned was unstoppably bound to relocate itself. It became the worm in the bud that is about to be nipped.

  Because they come home to roost, chickens. The one with my name on it might be doing so right now, since though it is sunrise here in the West, it is sunset there in the East, and she may well turn in early because she has this cough, she has this headache, she has this runny beak; probably only a cold, cry the others, there’s a lot of it about, but they are just clucking to keep their spirits up, they know sure as eggs is eggs that one of their best friends is going to show up any moment now to strangle them all and chuck them on the bonfire. But what if the worm in the bud is a new mutant strain, and the best friend himself feels a bit under the weather tomorrow? Nothing to worry about, says his wife, putting a caring hand to his thumping brow; but she works on the desk at Chen Ding Airport and next day the hand is passing a ticket to a happy fellow winging back to Manchester with a nice new contract for this or that, jostling the Ringway crowds as he hurries home to . . .

  Then again, that may not be the chicken with my name on it: mine may be much closer to home, because it is no longer a chicken at all but a tasty nugget of mechanically recovered slurry bulked up with polyphosphates and cosmetically reconstituted reptile organs from more than one country of origin, pullulating, inside its fetching mahogany scab, with enough hormones to sprout jordans on a priapic rat, and sloshing about in a zesty sauce made to a secret recipe discovered on Josef Mengele’s Rolodex. Anyone tucking in to a £1.99 jumbo bucket of this muck deserves all he gets, of course, but none of us is safe: I have walked past my local Colonel Bogey and felt my nostrils clog with bacterial pong. I could keel over any minute.

  And if I did, well-wishers would be advised to take great care where they laid me: for were the inhalation not to see me off, the pillow beneath my head might. For, as you’ll have read, the industrial use of feathers is to be much more rigorously regulated, because unscrupulous merchants and stuffers have been cutting expensive goose down and duck down with cheap chicken down, off which anything could be caught – probably through the ear, personally one of my least favourite sites for catchable items, since they could be down that hole quicker than the White Rabbit and, once out of sight, up to God knows what.

  So, then, is there anything we can do to lengthen the odds against our being felled, one way or another, by what has clearly become man’s worst enemy? Yes, just possibly, through alternative therapy – the alternative to lurching into a hospital where the kitchens cook the chicken which any day now will be revealed to be the source of all NHS cross-infection, i.e. nobody’s fault – because laughter, University of Maryland boffins declared last week, is the best medicine. If you feel anything nasty coming on, a good joke, their research shows, sets the immune system up a treat.

  Provided, of course, it doesn’t involve a chicken crossing a road.

  Time Out

  THE worst thing about being a child of the twentieth century is that you end up an adult of the twenty-first. The present is a foreign country; they do things differently here.

  It is time to talk about time. I do not know what time it is, because my watch isn’t working. You will say, hang on, you could look out of the window, you live next door to a church with a clock, but what you do not know is that the church clock isn’t working, either. Once upon a time, a man with a green baize apron and a bag of spanners would have pedalled up on a squeaky Rudge, leaned it against the railings, and climbed up to sort things out. But the vicar cannot get a man with a green baize apron, these days, for love nor money; since, when it comes to churches, both are now in short supply.

  Hang further on, you will say, we know you write on a computer, why don’t you just look at the top of the screen where it says the time is 11.06 p.m.? Because the time is not 11.06 p.m. If it were, the sun wouldn’t be out. Now, while there is probably a way of adjusting a computer clock, I do not know what it is, because computers do not come with manuals any more, the way they did in the twentieth century, having become so complicated that a manual would be bigger and pricier than the computer. I could fiddle with the keyboard in the hope of getting lucky and finding how you adjust the clock, but whenever I have fiddled with the keyboard, I have never got lucky, I have only got unlucky, and been forced to take the computer back to where I bought it, usually in the middle of an article which has vanished for good.

  Writing didn’t used to be like that when I was a child of the twentieth century. It is nearly 50 years since I first wrote for money, and I wrote for it with a pencil and paper, which I could carry around in my trouser pocket and use anywhere. The pencil and paper never went wrong, unless you count a bit of sharpening, but there was always room in my trouser pocket for a penknife, too. I cannot get my computer into my trouser pocket, and it goes wrong all the time, but editors and publishers do not accept paper any more, and anyway, I have lost the longhand knack.

  It is also nearly 50 years since I had a watch that didn’t go wrong. My dad bought it for me when, at 12, I first went off to Scout camp, because he was a caring man and knew that when the Scoutmaster shouted: ‘Synchronise watches!’ his son would look a prat without something to synchronise. It was a terrific watch: not only could you wind it up every night and discover it was still telling the right time the next morning; during that night, in the tent, you could read by it. It was the world’s most luminous watch, because little was known about radioactivity. If Hans Blix had found a watch like that on Saddam Hussein’s bedside table, George W. wouldn’t be in the embarrassing situation he is in today. All in all, I was probably lucky to have it pinched four years later: the thief’s grandchildren may well have two heads by now.

  But it kept perfect time, and never went wrong; unlike the one I replaced it with, using the first money I ever earned with pencil and paper. This was described as an automatic, because you didn’t have to wind it, all you had to do was shake your wrist every half an hour to stop it stopping. It did not, however, stop people asking what was wrong with your wrist, unless they were the sensitive kind who reckoned that an adolescent with an incurable tic might prefer not to have attention constantly drawn to it. After a few years, I got sick of all the shaking, especially as my left forearm was growing stronger than my right – which may explain why my tennis is so lousy – so I got married to allow my new father-in-law to buy me a Bulova Accutron as a wedding present. It was the first electronic watch, run on a battery which powered a tuning-fork. The first person to ask me: ‘What’s that peculiar humming noise?’ was Mrs Coren. On our wedding-night.

  I had a lot of electric watches after that, always two simultaneously, because when one was sent away for a new battery, it didn’t come back for a month, with a bill to include service, new crystal, new waterproofing, and a lot of other stuff to enable three figures to be aggregated. That is why I was so happy, last year, to find the wor
ld’s first sun-powered watch: no winding, no battery, just be sure your wrist is regularly exposed to light.

  Oh yes, and keep it away from all static electricity sources. They didn’t tell me that when I bought it. They told me yesterday when I rang up to ask why it was on the fritz. ‘Do you wear it,’ they asked, ‘when using a computer?’

  Stands England Where It Did?

  BOOKS were always important in my family: I grew up surrounded by them. My mother’s father ran one, her brother ran one, and her cousin ran one. Not licensed, mind: they were off-course bookies, in an era when, of course, the trade was illicit. You could go down for it. And I did: I went down to The Dog and Duck, and I stood outside, waiting for men who were old enough to sit inside to come outside and pass me their betting slips, so that I could slip down to this relative or that and slip them the slips and the legal tender that illegally went with them. I was a runner; and not, at 12, a bad one – when, perhaps because of this early training, I became an even better one, I could be found running round the Iffley Road track after Jeffrey Archer, possibly the iffiest couple ever to do so: that the entire Thames Valley constabulary wasn’t running after us is down only to history’s poor sense of timing.

  So, then, the three themes laid out on today’s wonky stall are gambling, pubs, and Oxford, and I am flogging them as a package: what is up for grabs is nothing less than Olde Englande, and I rather fear that when Newe Laboure has finished grabbing it, there will be a whole lot less.

  Half a century ago, Britain’s gambling culture was a bit special: it was remarkably animated, relying not only on runners, but on duckers and divers, and bobbers and weavers. If you wanted to bet on horses or dogs, the only legitimate way was to go to the track, but if you wanted to bet on them anywhere else, or on anything else, there was no legitimate way at all. You had to descend quite literally into an underworld of basement spielers, where dodgy entrepreneurs had paid off dodgier coppers to turn a blind eye while cards were riffled and wheels spun and dice tossed, and wads of cash slid from hand to hand, usually in one direction only.

  It wasn’t an evil world, just a bit naughty, a bit wicked, a bit, well, gamey – and very hard to find. It didn’t get evil until gambling was legitimised, when it became very easy to find: it may always have been a mug’s game, but now everyone, effortlessly, could be a mug. Worse yet, it all grew, though I lack the space to explain in detail how, less British; and now, under the crackpot croupiership of New Labour, it is about to become not British at all. It is to be Las Vegan.

  The pub isn’t going to be Las Vegan, though: it is going to be continental. I’m not entirely certain what the Prime Minister thinks he means by that – does he envisage us sitting around toasting Derrida in pastis to the sound of accordions, does he expect us to link arms and chorus our ambitions for the Sudetenland, are we to slump beside our umpteenth vodka, weeping for our dead babushka, or, having sluiced down our ploughman’s taramasalata with our umpteenth ouzo, smash the plate? – but whatever he thinks he wants from 24-hour drinking, what he is not going to get is ‘Time, gentlemen, please!’ as the tea-towels drop over the pumps while the last ha’penny is shoved, and softly belching grown-ups toddle out into the earlyish night, less plastered than is required for vomiting into a letter-box before chucking a gravel bin through Dixon’s window and butting an OAP.

  You will, I imagine, have spotted that I am not merely wailing objectively on behalf of all the babies whose own drowning cries cannot be heard over the Government’s disappearing bathwater: and since you have detected just a smidgeon of value judgment in today’s farrago, you will not be surprised to learn where I stand on the news that, because of the Government’s annual underfunding of £100m, Oxford University is to cut the number of British undergraduates it admits and ‘vigorously recruit’ more foreign students, who pay the full whack for their degrees.

  Yes, where I stand is four-square behind the Department of Education, punching the air; because its stinginess will ensure that Oxford does not go down the cultural drain. Filling the place with foreigners is the surest way of preserving it: walk down any Oxford street, and the flannelled fool pedalling towards you on an old Rudge bicycle with an oar on one gowned shoulder, a teddy bear on the other, and a copy of Zuleika Dobson tucked under the leather-elbowed arm of his college-badged blazer is bound to be from either Minneapolis or Tokyo; where he has always dreamed of dreaming spires.

  And now he is cycling to the Bodleian Library, to find out what a crumpet is, and how to prong it.

  All The World’s A Stage

  CULTURE stalwarts have been plunged into gloom at the news that many London theatres are about to go, literally, dark, after an unprecedented loss of audiences; and since the Society of London Theatre is at a loss to understand the loss, let me explain it.

  For the fact is that, while it will be agreed that a night at a great London theatre is a wonderfully enriching experience, more and more people are discovering that, with a little effort, they can replicate that experience without actually coughing up £40 a head. Mrs Coren and I certainly have.

  It is Friday night. After an enervating week, we feel we owe ourselves the tonic treat of The West Wing, Friends, and The Simpsons. Like the theatre, it starts at 7.45, too early to eat before, so we shall eat after. We leave the house in good time, and park as far away as possible, allowing us to arrive back at the house, breathless and rainsoaked, just in time to take our seats. My chair, such is the fortuitous construction of our living-room, has been placed behind a pillar; Mrs Coren’s chair is behind mine. In order to see either half of the screen, I have to lean first to the left, then to the right, as of course does Mrs Coren, alternatively. From time to time she will strike me on the shoulder and remind me that some people have come here to see the telly. I whip round and tell her that if that’s the case, she should stop repeating the actor’s lines, because it prevents me from hearing the next ones. She retaliates by opening a two kilo box of Maltesers.

  At the end of The West Wing, rush to the lavatory, only to find she has beaten me to it. I queue. By the time I get back, Friends has started, and she won’t let me take my seat. I have to stand at the back, whence the screen is so small, it could be ping-pong from Beijing. At the commercial break, Mrs Coren runs out into the downpouring street to smoke a fag, but the break is brief; this time, I make her stand at the back. But I do not enjoy the second half, for I have fetched myself an ice cream, and the little spoon has broken off in the tub and flicked raspberry ripple onto my trousers. I move about so much in trying to rub it off that Mrs Coren calls the manager. Since it is my turn to be the manager, I tell myself to sit still or leave.

  Before The Simpsons starts, there is time for a gin and tonic. Or would be, if the woman in front of me weren’t ordering a brown sherry, a Guinness, a dry martini, a San Pellegrino, three packets of low-calorie pork scratchings, and can she have a tray? When I get back, ginless, the woman is sitting in my seat. I do not make a fuss, because it is her turn to be the manager, and she will throw me out.

  At the end of The Simpsons, we go to the hall cupboard to get our coats, but they have vanished, and by the time we get downstairs to the kitchen, it is too late for a hot dinner. Mrs Coren asks me if I can run to a sandwich, but I tell her (in Polish) that the cook has gone home, and I am not allowed, under the terms of my temporary visa, to prepare food. So we go out into what is now sleet to collect the car, which has, of course, been (a) clamped, (b) towed, or/and (c) trashed. Luckily, there are no cabs and the last bus has gone, allowing us to walk home shouting at one another. It has been a magical evening. It has been what theatre is all about.

  Marching On My Stomach

  I was much moved at our great Prime Minister’s personal intervention in the furore over unsatisfactory school dinners: not only did it stand in a great British tradition, it took me back . . .

  Deer Mr Cherchill:

  Yesday we had Rusian sallad again. It was the thurd time this weak. The thing with Rusia
n sallad is it looks like sombody else has alredy et it. Nobody on mi tabel tuched it, not even Gerald Bottley, who eets wurms. We all want to fite for you wen we gro up, but if we do not eet, we will not gro up at all, our feet wil not reech tank pedals, we will be too week to pul triggars, wen we jump out on parashoots we will be too lite and get blone all over the plase. You will hav to do somthing. PS, wel done at Allermane, pleese congrachlate all conserned, yores A. Coren, 4b.

  Dear Master Coren:

  Russian salad is very good for you. That is why your Uncle Joe is enjoying such formidable success at Stalingrad, where, subsisting as they do entirely on sauerkraut, the enfeebled Narzis (sic) are about to be annihilated. My advice to you is to eat with your eyes shut, and make believe: you must say to 4b, ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our dinner and so stuff ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and its Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say ‘That was the finest steak.’ Yours etc, WC

  Dear Mr Cherchill:

  Thank you for yore lettar. We dint half larf, do they reely call you WC, it must get on yore nurves, they call me Acorn, it is not too bad, Gerald Bottley is call Bummole, and I wunt like to tell you about Brian Cunliffe. I am not suprised the Narzis are sic, we had sourkrout yesday, even with yore eyes shut it was like string in vinniger. Why can’t we ever hav meat? They give us this sort of red lino and they say it is prest beef, but they are Hers, posibly Germen spies with orders to kill us by choaking. Good werk in Casablanca, by the way, did Mr Roosevelt give you eny chewing-gumm? Wot we wuld reely like is some chicken. Culd you fix that? For yore infmation, I am not the master. Our Master is Old Farty. Yores A. Coren (boy)

  Dear Master Coren:

  Some chicken? I must say, you have some neck: none of us will have chicken until Hitler is defeated, upon which joyous day we shall eat it on the beaches, we shall eat it on the landing grounds, we shall eat it in the fields and in the streets, we shall eat it in the hills, we shall never stop eating it; but for the present, I must urge you to persevere with the pressed beef of old England. I also advise you to do the same with your studies: I cannot but observe that you are presently writing the sort of English up with which I will not put.