Pistache by Sebastian Faulks
A traveller across that windy heath would have seen Wimborne Minster start the game well with a brace of neatly taken goals by the poacher, Boldwood, back from a loan spell with Charminster. The return of the native did not last long, however, as when celebrating his second, he slipped on ground made treacherous by a leaking gutter from the roof of the main stand and broke his back.
On the stroke of half-time, Farfrae, the new boy from Ayr, was penalised for handball, though replays clearly showed that the ball had not touched him. Egdon scored from the spot and the Minsters’ lead was halved at the break.
While the teams were off, heavy snow fell and the gale-force wind, which had been in Wimborne’s face for the first forty-five minutes, turned round to confront them with its bitter fury once again.
Henchard, the left-back, did not return to the field of play after the interval, when he discovered that his wife had been delivered of stillborn twins. Durbeville, Wimborne’s close-season signing from Auxerre, was ruled ineligible when the Channel packet was delayed and his registration papers were accidentally delivered to the wrong address. To make matters worse for the Blues, Fawley, the other substitute, was found hanged in the team coach.
Reduced to nine men, Wimborne Minster battled bravely against the elements till the sixtieth minute, when Winterbourne, a tireless labourer in the middle of the park, felt his Achilles tendon snap. Troy scored a tap-in equaliser for the visitors in the eightieth minute.
In the pitiless rain, Wimborne held out till deep into stoppage time, when Everdene, on for the fatally injured Boldwood, sliced the ball into the roof of her own net from thirty yards. The President of the FA had, in the Aeschylean manner, finished his sport with Wimborne Minster.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
writes a Christmas round-robin
It was another year at 43 Havana Avenue.
The boy went to the university. We drove to the university in a car. When the weeks had passed the boy took exams. He took exams in media studies, sociology and theory of knowledge. He studied other girlish subjects. He passed the exams.
The girl was in a ‘gap’ year. She went to Pamplona. She lived among men and bulls. She has grown her first moustache. It is a good moustache.
The woman is expecting a child. The man was not expecting a child.
Now the woman is tired. Since last Christmas she has grown older, and heavy in the thigh.
She sits on the veranda at night and drinks beer.
‘Dos cervezas,’ she calls out. The beer is cold.
Grandpa is running guns from a small boat in Bexhill. He has a boy to work for him. The boy is lazy, but he knows the South Coast. He knows the beach at Winchelsea. He knows the safe landings at Hove.
Grandma stays home. She is not so agile since the thing with her leg. She lost it to a marlin off West Wittering in May.
Papa is working, still. He sits at the typewriter. What he writes is not good. He tears it up. Only when he writes in blood does he write real words. But there is not enough blood left in his veins.
So in the summer he did home improvement. He bought a seven-pound sledgehammer and a furlong and a half of copper piping. He built an en-suite guest shower room. The bidet is in avocado. The water runs from faucets marked ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. The water is cold.
The shower cubicle said ‘self-assembly’, but that was a lie. It did not assemble itself. He took it back to the store, but you know how it is with the bums at B and Q. So he got a man in to do the work, a mulatto from Selsey Bill. But not for the tiling. No, not for that. The tiling took cojones.
Last Christmas we also wrote to you. The season was … Merry.
HILARIA HOLMROYD
offers an exclusive extract from her new literary biography
Thoughout the cold winter of 1934, Sibyl was at work on her fourth novel, A Time of Loving. The main character, Amelia Wishart, was a portrait of Ramsay MacDonald’s mistress, Eileen. Tramways, the remote Cornish house where Amelia lives with her first husband Denzil, was based on Fisters, Ottoline Morrell’s childhood home in Dorset. Denzil was taken by all Amelia’s friends to be a depiction of Eddie Sackville-West, with whom she and Blossom Garnett had both recently terminated their long-standing affairs. Urged on by ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, Goronwy Rees claimed that he himself was in fact the model for Denzil, while Sackville-West appeared only as the footman, Spittal.
Sybille’s beloved sister Victoria dominates the first part of the novel in the guise of Hester, the depressive painter, whose Mayfair flat – where in one unforgettable scene she entertains the lecherous novelist T. H. Wildbloode – was based on the Sloane Square apartment of Amelia’s friend, the cross-dressing Slade figure painter, Camilla Gentleman. The curtains came from a design by William Morris and had been copied by Amelia from Dora Carrington’s house in Wimborne Minster. Wildbloode was of course a portrait of the young H. G. Wells, with whom Hester had entered into an unwise liaison the previous autumn at a house party given by Vanessa Lytton-Duff, herself Denzil’s mistress at the time.
Gerald’s spaniel William was based on Augustus John’s beagle, Maynard. Amelia’s dress was copied from Rebecca’s ballgown at Manderley and her Alice band was lifted from the Liddell family vault.
In Sibyl: Lover, Muse and Artist (Hogarth Press, 1978), Virginia Cornford argues that Bluey, the mute budgerigar so instrumental in Denzil’s final comeuppance, was based on a canary belonging to Enid Blyton. However, Lady Ann Hastings told John Sparrow that the bird in question was dead before Sibyl could have met it.
There remains the, admittedly remote, possibility that the character of the budgerigar was in some way ‘invented’.
HENRY JAMES
attempts a stand-up joke
She crossed the threshold of the surgery, Millie Tarver, her Connecticut eyes lively with the breeding of a kind that, through all the long years and with whatever qualification had been disavowed by her countrymen, suggested to the doctor’s eye with which the Prince was blessed, ill health, or something less than good health, or less like itself than more, far more, like the dimly perceived figure in a palazzo tapestry than it can at any rate at first have appeared.
‘Doctor, doctor,’ Millie threw out at last, ‘I keep believing, or in any case assuming, that I am a dog.’
‘I see,’ returned the Prince d’Ambivalente. ‘Or at least I shall endeavour to see, if you would place yourself upon my couch.’
The Prince was not wholly disconcerted by this tone of hers, nor was his perception so occluded as to prevent or in any case distract his knowledge that the hum of vain things, such as her lively clothes and fresh manner, might not so affect his impression première from which later insights might derive that, given the unavoidable allowances for the incessancy of effect of this exquisite creature upon the cultural saturation with which fourteen centuries of Florentine aristocracy had endowed him, it would come to be seen even by an epopt of blatancy to be based ineluctably and in the end upon a false, or at any rate erroneous, observation.
‘I am to ask you’, said Millie, ‘if I might not persuade you to withdraw your instruction towards the couch which is, in my present circumstances and with what ever knots and anfractuosities I hope ultimately to unburden myself to you, dear Prince, contrary to my nature and my breeding.’
‘And why so, Miss Tarver?’ said Prince d’Ambivalente.
‘Because’, barked Millie, falling to her hands and knees, ‘I am not allowed upon the furniture.’
DR JOHNSON
is still in the pub
‘I fear our national game is fallen in such a slough as neither Mr Eriksson nor his ’prentice Mr Beckham may yet find strength or devilry to rescue it. Your health, sir. Only yesterday, peering through the inspissated gloom at the Middlesex town of Wembley, I perceived a small boy known to the rabble as Owen who ran prodigiously across the meadow in constantly disappointed hopes of contact with a compatriot, and his comical opposite, a giant the mob called Heskey, who each time he received the ball saw it rebound mightil
y from his shin into the safekeeping of the enemy; or else fell face-first to the turf, a Goliath brought low by the simple expedient of gravity. Thank you. Put it next to my ale, sir.
‘Alongside him, the boy Haberdasher, nay, Dyer, paid 10,000 guineas for a sennight’s toil, declares himself unable to strike the bladder with his other foot, and runs around the orb so better to position it upon the favoured right, revolving like a mule upon a Stafford treadmill. For such a handsome pension, sir, I had rather propel the balloon with my nose, scrofula notwithstanding, than to confess to such incompetence.
‘Rearmost of this crew stood the woeful Mariner, nay, Seaman, whose unshorn locks bob upon his back like the tail of Mr Boswell’s pony. Why, sir, my friend Mrs Thrale was never prettier coiffed than this fellow; though Hester, God bless her, never wandered from her custodial duties in such a reverie, allowing lobs to overfly her, nor flapped her pretty hands at them like a sealion upon a ringmaster’s bidding. What? Yes, I shall take another quart of brandy if you please.’
JAMES JOYCE
makes a best man’s speech
Enumerate the misdeeds of your oldest friend, the bridegroom.
Infantile and adolescent inattention to the Latin conjugation of the holy fathers, necessitating manual application of the pandybat upon the rear conjunction and the saying of infinite-decimal rosy knees to Saint Pignatius of Disloyola and recitation ad nauseam of the Harvey Pariah.
What else?
A fondness for whiskey provenant in the distillery of Myrtle McInerney’s, Number 43 Upper Leeson Street, taken solus, duplicitous and tremble.
Anatomise further the virile and hominal failings.
A weakness for fornication – several, serial and particular, with professional ladies, nocturnal walkers, painted Charlottes, scarlet Jessie-belles, principally resident, but only by the hour, in the rosiluciate section of Mabbott Street.
Nominate a selection of the obliging acquaintance.
Sarah Delaney, Sarah Molloy, Kitty Murphy, Gertie MacDowell, Andie MacDowell (a lack, alack, and solely in his solitary dreams), Eileen O’Leary and Sheilagh MacIlwaine.
Sheilagh MacIlwaine, the one-armed piston?
Indeed. In verity. In fact, Verity as well, now I come to think of—
Explain the manner of their conjugation.
Matutinal, meriodinal, nocturnal, bi-mensual, semi-annual and perennial; in more ferarum, in Morry’s Ferrari, as horse and jockey, as coarse and mucky; coitus in situ, ab extra, in manus tuas, tuas, Domine.
Elucidate the reasons for the attendance of these several ladies at the nuptial mass.
I will, yes, my heart is going like mad and I said, Yes I will! Yes! Here they are, the very same:
Ladies and Gentile-men, the Bridesmaids!
FRANZ KAFKA
tries to keep up with the world of Mr Gates
Hans T awoke one morning after a troubled dream to find his right hand had turned into a large mouse. ‘Good boy, Hans,’ said his mother when she came into his bedroom. ‘Now you can book our holiday on the Internet.’
Two large men in raincoats sat Hans in front of a screen.
‘Who sent you?’ he asked.
‘Never mind,’ said the first man. ‘Click your fingers.’
‘Mmm,’ said the second man. ‘Microsoft Word has experienced an unexpected error.’
‘What?’ said Hans.
‘Did your browser stop working?’ said the first policeman. ‘Or did you restart your computer without shutting it down first?’
‘Or’, said the second man, ‘did you recently add a new item to your active desktop?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Hans. ‘But what shall I do now?’
‘Do this,’ said the first man brusquely. ‘Right-click the desktop to show the desktop menu, point to active desktop, click customise my desktop.’
‘Clear the checkbox for the item you added most recently,’ said the second man, more gently. ‘Right-click the desktop, point to the active desktop, then click show web content. Did you want to turn off your active desktop?’
‘No,’ said Hans. ‘I want to buy a coach ticket for my mother.’
An hour later Hans had reached the site of Castle Tours. The screen froze, while a small egg timer whirled in fixed mockery.
Eight hours after this, his mother came into the room. ‘Will you get off the line, Hans,’ she said. ‘I’m expecting a call from your Aunt Gudrun.’
‘This thing doesn’t seem to work,’ said Hans.
‘Get up,’ yelled the first man, ‘your message has permanent fatal errors. Come with us.’
‘Where to?’ said Hans.
‘You will see,’ said the second man softly. ‘You have performed an illegal operation.’
RUDYARD KIPLING
offers advice to a would-be journalist
If you can’t write but don’t let that deter you;
If you can’t spell and know by now you never will;
If once you know the facts but still prefer to
Tell lies for fear the truth won’t fit the bill;
If you can sub a piece about a women’s college
And think it’s fine to call it ‘Girls on Top’;
If the apogee of all your gather’d knowledge
Is the size of Beckham’s shorts and Jordan’s top;
If ‘Whose — Is it Anyway’ is your ambition
To shepherd into print day after day;
If you have once applied for a position –
And found they all would hire you straight away;
If you can mix with crowds and learn their mores
If you can meet with kings and break their trust,
If you can cheat your wife while off on foreign stories
But at ‘love cheats’ still feign profound disgust;
If you can never fail to write a headline
And cap it off with some moronic pun
Yours is the Earth when comes the final deadline
And – which is more – you’ll be ‘iconic’, son.
PHILIP LARKIN
prepares lines in celebration of the Queen Mother’s 115th Birthday
They mucked you up, your Mum - and Dad-in-law;
And then the lisping brother and his Yankee bitch:
For them the plane trees and the parties by the Seine;
For you the chores, the kiddies and the Blitz,
Snagging your slightly-outmoded shoes on the rubble
Of Mrs Snotweed’s privy in what’s left of Bethnal Green.
In the back seat of the hearse-like Daimler going home,
You scan the Evening News to see the outcome
Of your five-bob treble in the last at Haydock Park.
Another Railway Arms slides past, its table d’hôte a pie,
Stewed pears, pale ale and something final in the dark.
In castle corridors the draught disturbs dead forebears,
Balmoral princes in their lifeless gilt.
You cut the ribbon at the local ‘media studies’ centre;
A dozen sycophants grow flushed on Tesco’s Riesling;
Your mincing courtiers make jokes about the kilt.
But Christmas time: your daughter mumming on the idiot box,
‘My husband and I …’ – a phrase long lost to you … Loneliness revives: the slice of lemon,
Three good goes of gin – and somewhere, beyond the battlement,
A white moon glows; and you almost immortal, mortal too.
D. H. LAWRENCE
writes a brochure for 18-30 holidays
LASSES: Don’t be out of temper with the industrial society! Don’t let your soul break and be bowed down!
To the Puritan, all things are impure. Do you long to escape from the land where the pits have scarred the valley? Do you crave the true warmth of working people in the landscape of an older England? Does the clank of mechanical civilisation fill your heart with the dread of soot and lung disease and small minds?
Be a good ani
mal, true to your animal instincts. Wake up each day to find a woven coronet of daisies in your bush. Lie down beneath the stars and feel the world spin faster when you close your eyes.
Come with us to Mexico, Sea and Sardinia.
Fight always for the pure, for the holiness of passion against the dirt of the promiscuous sex relation. Must you always be matching your will to his rhythm when you can find the rainbow of eternal union and complete your own crisis with small whinnying cries?
LADS: Dost tha like ale and crumpet?
A. A. MILNE
gets gritty
Little boy kneels at the foot of the bed,
One nasal piercing in one little head.
Hush, hush, whisper who dare,
Christopher Robin hasn’t a prayer.
Peep through my fingers, what do I see?
Hot naked ladies on Murdoch TV.
Wearing a dressing gown, reading a mag,
There’s Mummy’s partner having a fag.
God bless Daddy, wherever he is,
It’s five years now since he gave me a kiss.
Oh Lord, don’t forget to make me look cool,
Stealing Toyotas and bunking off school.
Bright golden curls on a bright little bonce,
Grandma’s a pusher and uncle’s a nonce.
Give me a PlayStation, Game Cube at least,
Big Macs and Pringles for my midnight feast.
Lord, let the Social send a man round,
Get me out of this tower block, down to the ground.
Hush, hush, whisper who dare,
On the stroke of half-time, Farfrae, the new boy from Ayr, was penalised for handball, though replays clearly showed that the ball had not touched him. Egdon scored from the spot and the Minsters’ lead was halved at the break.
While the teams were off, heavy snow fell and the gale-force wind, which had been in Wimborne’s face for the first forty-five minutes, turned round to confront them with its bitter fury once again.
Henchard, the left-back, did not return to the field of play after the interval, when he discovered that his wife had been delivered of stillborn twins. Durbeville, Wimborne’s close-season signing from Auxerre, was ruled ineligible when the Channel packet was delayed and his registration papers were accidentally delivered to the wrong address. To make matters worse for the Blues, Fawley, the other substitute, was found hanged in the team coach.
Reduced to nine men, Wimborne Minster battled bravely against the elements till the sixtieth minute, when Winterbourne, a tireless labourer in the middle of the park, felt his Achilles tendon snap. Troy scored a tap-in equaliser for the visitors in the eightieth minute.
In the pitiless rain, Wimborne held out till deep into stoppage time, when Everdene, on for the fatally injured Boldwood, sliced the ball into the roof of her own net from thirty yards. The President of the FA had, in the Aeschylean manner, finished his sport with Wimborne Minster.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
writes a Christmas round-robin
It was another year at 43 Havana Avenue.
The boy went to the university. We drove to the university in a car. When the weeks had passed the boy took exams. He took exams in media studies, sociology and theory of knowledge. He studied other girlish subjects. He passed the exams.
The girl was in a ‘gap’ year. She went to Pamplona. She lived among men and bulls. She has grown her first moustache. It is a good moustache.
The woman is expecting a child. The man was not expecting a child.
Now the woman is tired. Since last Christmas she has grown older, and heavy in the thigh.
She sits on the veranda at night and drinks beer.
‘Dos cervezas,’ she calls out. The beer is cold.
Grandpa is running guns from a small boat in Bexhill. He has a boy to work for him. The boy is lazy, but he knows the South Coast. He knows the beach at Winchelsea. He knows the safe landings at Hove.
Grandma stays home. She is not so agile since the thing with her leg. She lost it to a marlin off West Wittering in May.
Papa is working, still. He sits at the typewriter. What he writes is not good. He tears it up. Only when he writes in blood does he write real words. But there is not enough blood left in his veins.
So in the summer he did home improvement. He bought a seven-pound sledgehammer and a furlong and a half of copper piping. He built an en-suite guest shower room. The bidet is in avocado. The water runs from faucets marked ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. The water is cold.
The shower cubicle said ‘self-assembly’, but that was a lie. It did not assemble itself. He took it back to the store, but you know how it is with the bums at B and Q. So he got a man in to do the work, a mulatto from Selsey Bill. But not for the tiling. No, not for that. The tiling took cojones.
Last Christmas we also wrote to you. The season was … Merry.
HILARIA HOLMROYD
offers an exclusive extract from her new literary biography
Thoughout the cold winter of 1934, Sibyl was at work on her fourth novel, A Time of Loving. The main character, Amelia Wishart, was a portrait of Ramsay MacDonald’s mistress, Eileen. Tramways, the remote Cornish house where Amelia lives with her first husband Denzil, was based on Fisters, Ottoline Morrell’s childhood home in Dorset. Denzil was taken by all Amelia’s friends to be a depiction of Eddie Sackville-West, with whom she and Blossom Garnett had both recently terminated their long-standing affairs. Urged on by ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, Goronwy Rees claimed that he himself was in fact the model for Denzil, while Sackville-West appeared only as the footman, Spittal.
Sybille’s beloved sister Victoria dominates the first part of the novel in the guise of Hester, the depressive painter, whose Mayfair flat – where in one unforgettable scene she entertains the lecherous novelist T. H. Wildbloode – was based on the Sloane Square apartment of Amelia’s friend, the cross-dressing Slade figure painter, Camilla Gentleman. The curtains came from a design by William Morris and had been copied by Amelia from Dora Carrington’s house in Wimborne Minster. Wildbloode was of course a portrait of the young H. G. Wells, with whom Hester had entered into an unwise liaison the previous autumn at a house party given by Vanessa Lytton-Duff, herself Denzil’s mistress at the time.
Gerald’s spaniel William was based on Augustus John’s beagle, Maynard. Amelia’s dress was copied from Rebecca’s ballgown at Manderley and her Alice band was lifted from the Liddell family vault.
In Sibyl: Lover, Muse and Artist (Hogarth Press, 1978), Virginia Cornford argues that Bluey, the mute budgerigar so instrumental in Denzil’s final comeuppance, was based on a canary belonging to Enid Blyton. However, Lady Ann Hastings told John Sparrow that the bird in question was dead before Sibyl could have met it.
There remains the, admittedly remote, possibility that the character of the budgerigar was in some way ‘invented’.
HENRY JAMES
attempts a stand-up joke
She crossed the threshold of the surgery, Millie Tarver, her Connecticut eyes lively with the breeding of a kind that, through all the long years and with whatever qualification had been disavowed by her countrymen, suggested to the doctor’s eye with which the Prince was blessed, ill health, or something less than good health, or less like itself than more, far more, like the dimly perceived figure in a palazzo tapestry than it can at any rate at first have appeared.
‘Doctor, doctor,’ Millie threw out at last, ‘I keep believing, or in any case assuming, that I am a dog.’
‘I see,’ returned the Prince d’Ambivalente. ‘Or at least I shall endeavour to see, if you would place yourself upon my couch.’
The Prince was not wholly disconcerted by this tone of hers, nor was his perception so occluded as to prevent or in any case distract his knowledge that the hum of vain things, such as her lively clothes and fresh manner, might not so affect his impression première from which later insights might derive that, given the unavoidable allowances for the incessancy of effect of this exquisite creature upon the cultural saturation with which fourteen centuries of Florentine aristocracy had endowed him, it would come to be seen even by an epopt of blatancy to be based ineluctably and in the end upon a false, or at any rate erroneous, observation.
‘I am to ask you’, said Millie, ‘if I might not persuade you to withdraw your instruction towards the couch which is, in my present circumstances and with what ever knots and anfractuosities I hope ultimately to unburden myself to you, dear Prince, contrary to my nature and my breeding.’
‘And why so, Miss Tarver?’ said Prince d’Ambivalente.
‘Because’, barked Millie, falling to her hands and knees, ‘I am not allowed upon the furniture.’
DR JOHNSON
is still in the pub
‘I fear our national game is fallen in such a slough as neither Mr Eriksson nor his ’prentice Mr Beckham may yet find strength or devilry to rescue it. Your health, sir. Only yesterday, peering through the inspissated gloom at the Middlesex town of Wembley, I perceived a small boy known to the rabble as Owen who ran prodigiously across the meadow in constantly disappointed hopes of contact with a compatriot, and his comical opposite, a giant the mob called Heskey, who each time he received the ball saw it rebound mightil
‘Alongside him, the boy Haberdasher, nay, Dyer, paid 10,000 guineas for a sennight’s toil, declares himself unable to strike the bladder with his other foot, and runs around the orb so better to position it upon the favoured right, revolving like a mule upon a Stafford treadmill. For such a handsome pension, sir, I had rather propel the balloon with my nose, scrofula notwithstanding, than to confess to such incompetence.
‘Rearmost of this crew stood the woeful Mariner, nay, Seaman, whose unshorn locks bob upon his back like the tail of Mr Boswell’s pony. Why, sir, my friend Mrs Thrale was never prettier coiffed than this fellow; though Hester, God bless her, never wandered from her custodial duties in such a reverie, allowing lobs to overfly her, nor flapped her pretty hands at them like a sealion upon a ringmaster’s bidding. What? Yes, I shall take another quart of brandy if you please.’
JAMES JOYCE
makes a best man’s speech
Enumerate the misdeeds of your oldest friend, the bridegroom.
Infantile and adolescent inattention to the Latin conjugation of the holy fathers, necessitating manual application of the pandybat upon the rear conjunction and the saying of infinite-decimal rosy knees to Saint Pignatius of Disloyola and recitation ad nauseam of the Harvey Pariah.
What else?
A fondness for whiskey provenant in the distillery of Myrtle McInerney’s, Number 43 Upper Leeson Street, taken solus, duplicitous and tremble.
Anatomise further the virile and hominal failings.
A weakness for fornication – several, serial and particular, with professional ladies, nocturnal walkers, painted Charlottes, scarlet Jessie-belles, principally resident, but only by the hour, in the rosiluciate section of Mabbott Street.
Nominate a selection of the obliging acquaintance.
Sarah Delaney, Sarah Molloy, Kitty Murphy, Gertie MacDowell, Andie MacDowell (a lack, alack, and solely in his solitary dreams), Eileen O’Leary and Sheilagh MacIlwaine.
Sheilagh MacIlwaine, the one-armed piston?
Indeed. In verity. In fact, Verity as well, now I come to think of—
Explain the manner of their conjugation.
Matutinal, meriodinal, nocturnal, bi-mensual, semi-annual and perennial; in more ferarum, in Morry’s Ferrari, as horse and jockey, as coarse and mucky; coitus in situ, ab extra, in manus tuas, tuas, Domine.
Elucidate the reasons for the attendance of these several ladies at the nuptial mass.
I will, yes, my heart is going like mad and I said, Yes I will! Yes! Here they are, the very same:
Ladies and Gentile-men, the Bridesmaids!
FRANZ KAFKA
tries to keep up with the world of Mr Gates
Hans T awoke one morning after a troubled dream to find his right hand had turned into a large mouse. ‘Good boy, Hans,’ said his mother when she came into his bedroom. ‘Now you can book our holiday on the Internet.’
Two large men in raincoats sat Hans in front of a screen.
‘Who sent you?’ he asked.
‘Never mind,’ said the first man. ‘Click your fingers.’
‘Mmm,’ said the second man. ‘Microsoft Word has experienced an unexpected error.’
‘What?’ said Hans.
‘Did your browser stop working?’ said the first policeman. ‘Or did you restart your computer without shutting it down first?’
‘Or’, said the second man, ‘did you recently add a new item to your active desktop?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Hans. ‘But what shall I do now?’
‘Do this,’ said the first man brusquely. ‘Right-click the desktop to show the desktop menu, point to active desktop, click customise my desktop.’
‘Clear the checkbox for the item you added most recently,’ said the second man, more gently. ‘Right-click the desktop, point to the active desktop, then click show web content. Did you want to turn off your active desktop?’
‘No,’ said Hans. ‘I want to buy a coach ticket for my mother.’
An hour later Hans had reached the site of Castle Tours. The screen froze, while a small egg timer whirled in fixed mockery.
Eight hours after this, his mother came into the room. ‘Will you get off the line, Hans,’ she said. ‘I’m expecting a call from your Aunt Gudrun.’
‘This thing doesn’t seem to work,’ said Hans.
‘Get up,’ yelled the first man, ‘your message has permanent fatal errors. Come with us.’
‘Where to?’ said Hans.
‘You will see,’ said the second man softly. ‘You have performed an illegal operation.’
RUDYARD KIPLING
offers advice to a would-be journalist
If you can’t write but don’t let that deter you;
If you can’t spell and know by now you never will;
If once you know the facts but still prefer to
Tell lies for fear the truth won’t fit the bill;
If you can sub a piece about a women’s college
And think it’s fine to call it ‘Girls on Top’;
If the apogee of all your gather’d knowledge
Is the size of Beckham’s shorts and Jordan’s top;
If ‘Whose — Is it Anyway’ is your ambition
To shepherd into print day after day;
If you have once applied for a position –
And found they all would hire you straight away;
If you can mix with crowds and learn their mores
If you can meet with kings and break their trust,
If you can cheat your wife while off on foreign stories
But at ‘love cheats’ still feign profound disgust;
If you can never fail to write a headline
And cap it off with some moronic pun
Yours is the Earth when comes the final deadline
And – which is more – you’ll be ‘iconic’, son.
PHILIP LARKIN
prepares lines in celebration of the Queen Mother’s 115th Birthday
They mucked you up, your Mum - and Dad-in-law;
And then the lisping brother and his Yankee bitch:
For them the plane trees and the parties by the Seine;
For you the chores, the kiddies and the Blitz,
Snagging your slightly-outmoded shoes on the rubble
Of Mrs Snotweed’s privy in what’s left of Bethnal Green.
In the back seat of the hearse-like Daimler going home,
You scan the Evening News to see the outcome
Of your five-bob treble in the last at Haydock Park.
Another Railway Arms slides past, its table d’hôte a pie,
Stewed pears, pale ale and something final in the dark.
In castle corridors the draught disturbs dead forebears,
Balmoral princes in their lifeless gilt.
You cut the ribbon at the local ‘media studies’ centre;
A dozen sycophants grow flushed on Tesco’s Riesling;
Your mincing courtiers make jokes about the kilt.
But Christmas time: your daughter mumming on the idiot box,
‘My husband and I …’ – a phrase long lost to you … Loneliness revives: the slice of lemon,
Three good goes of gin – and somewhere, beyond the battlement,
A white moon glows; and you almost immortal, mortal too.
D. H. LAWRENCE
writes a brochure for 18-30 holidays
LASSES: Don’t be out of temper with the industrial society! Don’t let your soul break and be bowed down!
To the Puritan, all things are impure. Do you long to escape from the land where the pits have scarred the valley? Do you crave the true warmth of working people in the landscape of an older England? Does the clank of mechanical civilisation fill your heart with the dread of soot and lung disease and small minds?
Be a good ani
Come with us to Mexico, Sea and Sardinia.
Fight always for the pure, for the holiness of passion against the dirt of the promiscuous sex relation. Must you always be matching your will to his rhythm when you can find the rainbow of eternal union and complete your own crisis with small whinnying cries?
LADS: Dost tha like ale and crumpet?
A. A. MILNE
gets gritty
Little boy kneels at the foot of the bed,
One nasal piercing in one little head.
Hush, hush, whisper who dare,
Christopher Robin hasn’t a prayer.
Peep through my fingers, what do I see?
Hot naked ladies on Murdoch TV.
Wearing a dressing gown, reading a mag,
There’s Mummy’s partner having a fag.
God bless Daddy, wherever he is,
It’s five years now since he gave me a kiss.
Oh Lord, don’t forget to make me look cool,
Stealing Toyotas and bunking off school.
Bright golden curls on a bright little bonce,
Grandma’s a pusher and uncle’s a nonce.
Give me a PlayStation, Game Cube at least,
Big Macs and Pringles for my midnight feast.
Lord, let the Social send a man round,
Get me out of this tower block, down to the ground.
Hush, hush, whisper who dare,