The Beautiful Virus

Inner Space

I’m just getting over a rotten cold. It hasn’t been nice, but, as a Brit, I feel I’ve done my bit. Colds are one of the glories of our culture, along with Shakespeare and Blake, and you’re expected to participate. Immigrants from warmer countries should be offered classes in the social significance of being a bit congested.

In fact, we should all do them, Brits and non-Brits. It’s a matter of sharing our National Heritage.  Here are just a few of the deep-rooted Folk Customs of the Sniffling Season.

The Ceremony of the Spreading of the Germs.  This is held where large numbers of people are crushed together, mainly on commuter trains and the tube. The ceremony begins with a few people tentatively sniffing into their Kleenexes. Someone (maybe in olden times they would have worn stag’s horns), sneezes out loud. There is a ritual Giving the Disapproving Glare and Holding up the Newspaper. Then someone responds to the sneeze. By the time the train pulls in, nearly everyone will be joining in a Mass Snort. The effect is overpoweringly emotional.

The Respectful Concert Cough  When an orchestra plays, in between movements it’s customary to encourage the players with a low cough which goes round the Hall. When this fails to happen, conductors turn round and glare at the audience until someone starts to splutter.

The Water Cooler Moan Game  This involves delicate conversational skills which can take years to master. The opening gambit goes something like “I’ve got a real shocker. Had it for two weeks.”  The response is “It’s going round.” People with real finesse might come out with something like “Honey and lemon’s best”. Intimidated pre-initiates should not hover round the margins. By getting in close they’ll catch the cold and tomorrow have a bash at the opening gambit.

We should celebrate Cold Culture with an International Mucus Day. Your suggestions are welcome. For example, at midday everyone could participate in a Two Minute Sneeze (sponsored by the hanky industry). We could market it with the slogan “It’s like Red Nose Day, except you don’t need to buy the nose”.

When to have it? In the classic period for British colds, of course – the summer. 

Shopping With Babes and Mum

By 2050 they'll have taken over

He nearly crashes into me at the Cakes corner. He’s steaming round with his baby buggy from the Desserts, I’m heading from the Deli Fridge. “Do we really need more rice?” he asks.

I’m about to suggest he tries couscous, although he doesn’t look like a couscous kind of man, when the cord dangling from his ear tells me it’s not my opinion he’s canvassing.

“OK babes” he sighs, moving on as he stuffs another packet of Uncle Ben’s into the basket balanced by the child’s rack of toys, “Your mum….”

I examine my crumpled shopping list.  Milk Toothpaste Chilli Powder Pasta.   I feel like a relic of a simpler time, like a mastodon who’s made it into the Bronze Age. I check what we need, write it down, and get it.  In other aspects of my life I’m as chaotic as a teenager, but my shopping runs along rigid lines, thanks to that Pleistocene scrap of paper.

Hands-free guy has parked the buggy by the cheese. “Does it have to be Cheshire, babes?” he moans, spitting “Your mum!…. no, not three….” but he slips the packets into the basket anyway. As I pass I hold up my list to show him there’s another way which involves no arguments, no looming relatives, no payment plans. He’s too busy balancing the crammed basket on the top of the buggy to notice.

The milk has moved. I curse the chain stores and their way of shifting the shelves around hoping you’ll be tempted by all the crisp packets you pass as you search. But Tescos Inc have met their match with me and my list.

He’s now by the cereals, having a furious argument about Cocoa Pops. Mum doesn’t like Shreddies, and he’s outnumbered by her and babes. I cruise past, but they’ve moved the pasta as well so he just beats me to the till queue. Baby’s begining to moan. His basket is overflowing while mine contains the four items. “Chicken nuggets on two for one? Look, I’m… OK, OK….”

He pushes his way past me back into the shop to dig out the nuggets. I’m left alone with baby and pull a face at it.

I finally make it through the till. “Want our Loyalty Card?” asks the woman. 

I check my list.  Milk Toothpaste Chilli Powder Pasta.   “No” I say. 

Having a Pint in the Senior’s Arms

He's actually converted his sitting room

My Teenage Self wants a word with me.

“It’s your drinking” he mumbles.

“I’ve had four pints and a double scotch,” I say, “That’s respectable boozing!”

“Nah. It’s your conversation. Your demeanour.” Then MTS hisses, “Old man’s pub!”

We’ve always detested old man’s pubs. They reek of stale beer and pee. To remove the old blokes from their stools would need surgery. They glare at anyone who’s not over 70, male or from the other end of the counter. Their conversation is torpid and their attitudes mean enough to steep their dentures in.

I’m nothing like that. Am I?

“What’s wrong with my conversation?” I ask. In fact I’ve just been chatting to Fred. I said “Beer’s good tonight.” He said “Joe in?” I said “No.”

MTS was unimpressed. “Boring! Nothing  happens here!!!!”

“Yes it does – look, Joe’s coming in.”

Coming up, Joe said, “Beer good tonight?” I said “Yes.”

MTS sneers. “You’re starting to glare at young people. Like those ones over there.”

“What do you expect?” I cry, “They’re drinking lager!”

I try to rise up from the bar stool to make my point. Inexplicably, I’m stuck to it. This makes me think. Does MTS have a point?

Things used to be livelier. I remember when Joe and I held Harry by the shoulders as he danced on the ceiling. I remember getting thrown from a pub for singing “Three German Officers”.

Maybe I could make the conversation more challenging. Maybe I could drop my trousers and do a tango along the counter….

Maybe not. The company’s fine. And the beer’s good.

I’ll tell MTS to hop it. I’ll start singing soon. And he doesn’t want to be anywhere near.

High Heels – the Staggering Truth

We went to a do recently. I can’t think of another word to describe it – it was too small for a party, too static for a dance and too boozy for a prayer meeting. The women got talking about shoes. Normally when women get on to the subject of their shoes, I start to count the number of tufts in the carpet. Then one woman said she had 35 pairs. Her tone was confessional, a bit like admitting to owning just two teaspoons. Another woman, with purple highlights, said she had 50. She’d be bringing the stock up to normal soon.

Call me out of touch with the current female zeitgeist, but I’m baffled. 50 pairs? All for the same feet? It’s like having 50 phones. Per hand, it works out the same mathematically. By the time you get to pair 50, pair 1 will be out of fashion. You’ll have to hit that mail order website again, but I suppose that’s the idea.

I blame “Sex and the City”. Some women now think their lives are meaningless unless they can open the wardrobe door and 75 pairs of Jimmy Choos fall out. I’ve seen them staggering out for a pint of milk in a £5.99 Primark tracksuit and a 4” pair of Manolos. I’ve seen them running for a bus and falling over their stilettos. I’m sure they stockpile shoes like nuclear weapons  and creep out at night to gloat at them, glowing in an eerie radioactive light.

“How do you work through 50 pairs -” I asked highlight woman, “on a rota basis?” “Oh no” she replied, “some of them I never take out of the box.”

Quite right. Nothing wrecks a pair of shoes so completely as wearing them.

Downsized Abbey

"It's the neighbours complaining again about the clinking teacups"

Series 3 of “Downton Abbey” has finished, to the usual criticism that it doesn't reflect everyday life in the UK.  To refute this, here is an extract from my diary, to be published by Harper Collins next year at £57.65 and expected to outsell Pippa Middleton’s next etiquette book. Readers can study the extract below for free.

Weds. 8.30am  Carberry, my under-valet, brought up my tea and copy of “Radio Fun”. He inserted the sugar lumps into my shirt and dropped the cufflinks into the tea. I need to speak to him about this. Yesterday he spread toothpaste over my collar, which did at least whiten it. But a man can’t face the day with wet cufflinks.

11.45  I got out of bed. On the way to work, played my usual couple of games of cricket with the servants. I invariably win: it’s hard to throw balls about when you’re balancing silver trays.

12.10pm  Work involves staring at a book in the library while stroking my chin and sipping a sherry. It may not sound very strenuous, but I have to keep it up all day.

 6.00  As usual the entire household assembled in the conservatory for the daily family crisis. On Monday the second footman had fallen off the roof, on Tuesday anthrax spores had been found in the kitchen garden, today one of my daughters had been caught listening to jazz. It is always solved by 6.05pm so I can dress for dinner.

6.05  I have 27,000 collar studs which Carberry lays across the lawn. Today he recommended the ruby-studded one as it would perfectly match the Strawberry Mousse.

7.30  At dinner, an ancient family tradition: the weekly vote on which family member is to have an affair with the Chauffeur. Cousin Ethel won by a narrow margin but the Chauffeur has finally escaped across the Channel with the Bentley.

11.05. In the bedroom, my wife asked me the difference between a second footman and an under-valet. Embarrassed to say that I didn’t know. Summoned Carberry, but he didn’t know either. I thought about sacking him, but wouldn’t know what I was sacking him from.

Thursday 8.30am Carberry brought up today’s “Beano”. He told me there’d been a revolution and now the servants were in charge. I was sent down to lick the grate clean. Carberry may be speaking the truth, but I don’t know. I never read the papers.

The 1960s. Everything you wished to forget.

There'd been a run on grey paint during the War

The 1960s are turning into a mere memory. That’s bad news for a decade which no one claims to remember. So here are some Pass Notes for the kids. My recollections, of course, may not be more reliable than anyone else’s…..

SAN FRANCISCO  In 1967 the San Francisco Police Chief had a brainwave to make pedestrians more visible to drivers, urging them on TV to “Be sure to wear a flower in your hair.” No one took much notice.  To make the message punchier he set it to music. The song went global and the city was thronged with people following his suggestion. Traffic incidents went down, but there was a big spike in hay fever fatalities.

PSYCHEDELIA  Delia Farrington was a sociopathic London go-go dancer who would wait outside her club to bludgeon people who hadn’t tipped her. The dazed victims would stagger down Oxford Street, ears ringing and vision blurred, screaming “Man, I’ve been zapped by Psycho Delia”.

LSD  In the 1960s the CIA had a plan to destroy the Soviets: by introducing unpronounceable words into the language they’d drive the natives crazy. Operatives infiltrated the country to introduce the letter combination “lsd” into Russian; “Dlsda”, “Nylsdet”, etc. Of course, Russians have been speaking unpronounceable words for centuries and easily assimilated the phrases, which were exported back to America. Soon Americans were behaving bizarrely and unpredictably, driven mad by “lsd”.

THE BEATLES  As everyone knows, post-Shakespeare England was a cultural desert for centuries. A minor civil servant was ordered to find a UK version of French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The best he could come up with was John Paul George Ringo. On being asked to interpret “L’enfer, c’est les autres” their funny Scouse accents turned it into “I am the Walrus”, which proved much more palatable to the paying public.

FLOWER POWER Hippies were notoriously aggressive. They would attack passers-by with clubs disguised by wreaths of marigolds. In those days “Pow” meant “To strike” or “To impress”. Hence, “Hey punk, get a taste of my flower pow-er.”

BOB DYLAN  For years this obnoxious untalented wannabe scoured Greenwich Village folk clubs for open mic spots. Embittered by constant failure, he flung open the doors of the Village Vanguard to the icy January blast, shouting to the punters as he stomped out, “Your asses, my friends, are blowin’ in the wind”. Both phrase and Dylan soon faded into obscurity.

Old folks - no sex jokes please

Wait till you see what they get up to when the car's gone past....

I went to a comedy club this week to watch a friend do his act. It was in a packed South London basement: it felt like going steerage on the “Titanic”. I was the oldest by about 30 years. The compere wanted to warm us up, even though it was about 45° down there. “Hug the person next to you!” he yelled.

I’m a Brit. I don’t really do hugs unless you’re Mrs K or the Kirwood sister or you’re rescuing me from a fire. The two girls on either side of me wrapped themselves round their blokes. “Hey – don’t leave him out!” screamed the compere. All eyes swivelled to me. Thanks, mate. One of the girls gave me a peremptory shoulder pat. I thought of screaming “Fire!” but it would have disrupted the evening.

The first act was in her 40s and her routine was about “fanny farts”. To the uninitiated, these are nothing to do with breaking wind. They involve a female sexual organ, an intimate act, and suction. Yep, you’re right. She wasn’t subtle. But her impressions of how ageing affects these noises - a twenty-five year old (like balloon air escaping) and then a thirty-five year old (imagine quicksand) - raised a lot of cackles.

She said “Now for a forty-five year old…” and someone shouted “Please – not that!” Then she “did” a fifty-five year old and was drowned out with groans of disgust. To these kids, jokes about older people having sex were about as off-limits as ones about strangling babies.

I was the only person laughing. All eyes flipped back to me. I touched volume control: maybe an older person actually chuckling in public is disgusting, too. I lifted my beer to my lips… NO! the sight of a sexuagenarian physically ingesting liquid would start a riot…

Luckily my friend was on next. He has a great routine about the difficulties of keeping your sex life going when you’re married. How we all roared. Mind you, he’s only 32.