In Competition No. 2764 you were invited to provide an example of a Spectator columnist stepping into a fellow columnist’s shoes.
It was a smallish entry by comparison with recent weeks and the standard was somewhat uneven. Deborah Ross proved a popular if elusive target. You struggled valiantly to capture her voice but no one completely pulled it off though Brian Murdoch came closest. The bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty, who played a blinder. His fellow winners take £25 each.
I have recently discovered a most ingenious and useful device. Since I am reluctant to deface the old rectory where I live with aerials, ‘dishes’ and the like, my access to television is necessarily restricted. My London flat has no television, contrary to the BBC’s firm belief that such a thing is impossible, an idée fixe that I may have mentioned here previously. Now a generous neighbour has passed on to me a number of boxes with the regrettably polyglot name of video cassettes and a video player enabling me to watch the televisual contents therein. I understand that it may even be possible to record television programmes to watch at more convenient times, though I have not yet attempted this. The system has many advantages for persons with limited time, and I believe it will have an important role to play in the future. I strongly recommend it.
Noel Petty/Charles Moore fills in for the Wiki Man
Q. We regularly take a very independent Aged Parent out to lunch. That’s all fine and jolly, but said A.P. invariably has signs of his breakfast — porridge, egg, marmalade, etc. — down his front. I’m sure he’d be mortified to see how he looks, but he’s impervious to hints and pointed glances. Any tactful ideas?
A. In his De Senectute (On Old Age) the philosopher Seneca wrote about the benefits of growing old. For Stoics it was good that the accretions overgrowing a mortal’s rational core start to drop away ‘as Autumn leaves fall to reveal the essential tree’. As well as ‘animal appetites’ we lose other more trivial impediments to the life of reason, such as ‘pudor fatuus’ (foolish embarrassment). Isn’t it possible that your parent is indifferent to his unkempt appearance rather than potentially mortified by it? His philosophy may be, Eat, drink and be messy, for tomorrow we’ll literally be mortified.
W.J. Webster/Ancient and Modern Mary
It is a saddening sign of our times that not all who receive disability benefit are legitimate claimants. Those able to work but preferring to live off the state constitute a modern Court of Miracles, which readers will recall from Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris.
No one could accuse the third Earl of Dorking of feigning disability, and only cruel tongues wagged about the loss of his nose to a sniper’s bullet at the Battle of Omdurman. He bravely continued to supervise his estate and attend the Upper House until his death in Monte Carlo in 1913. Interestingly, his cousin Catriona Briskett — of the Norfolk, not the Glamorgan, Brisketts — suffered a congenital deformity of the left big toe, yet seldom missed a Primrose League occasion and never a hunt ball.
Such grand figures might serve as what I believe are called ‘role models’ for the idlers of 2012.
G. M. Davis/Charles Moore does Rod Liddle
Q. Our eldest daughter has taken up with a racy set who strike us as ‘not quite the thing’: arrant hedonists, well-heeled though with no conspicuous source of income. Exotic skiing holidays and riotous odysseys on floating gin palaces seem to be the norm. She is not even a blip on their monetary radar. Should we intervene, Taki?
(Name withheld, SW3)
A. You do not indicate the age of your wanton but hey, it’s the 21st century and carpe diem is the name of the game. The young need to dip their toes, and whatever else, into life’s murky millstream, the better to distinguish pilchard from piranha. Speccie readers know how blotted my escutcheon is, as the mother of my children delights to remind me. Under no circumstances dream of intruding upon her lifestyle; kids often reveal more when not subject to parental pumping. Bonne chance.
Mike Morrison/Taki sits in for Mary Killen
There’s no finer sight in September than the hedgerows of the High Weald on my first day’s cub-hunting. The hounds are in full cry, and so am I with the Speccie’s Deputy Editor mounted beside me. But all the poor little Greek boy can think of is what magnificent country this would have been for Guderian’s XVIIth Panzers, barrelling through the Sussex bocage.
And who was lurking in the bushes last night? Nicholas Soames? The Sainted One? No, it was the BBC licence mafiosi again, complete with sensors. As they say in Whites’, go figure!
And while I’m on the subject, a reader sends me this from Radio 3: ‘Do you like heavy metal? So did Mahler! The Desperate Dan of symphonic writing.’ I may not know much about music, but I can tell when I’m being patronised by a fully paid-up Guardianista. But will the Beeb ever change? Fuggedaboutit!
Freddie Stockdale/Taki stands in for Charles Moore
In last week’s Competition you were asked to do something or other, only they never told me what — it takes ages for news to reach Crouch End — but it was probably something smartarse. Actually I quite like smartarse. Some of my best friends are smartarse, in fact, and we have brilliantly smartarse conversations over the taramasalata, which is really good if you get it from Waitrose. Anyway, some of the names of the entrants were quite sexy. I’ve always been a sucker for double-barrelled names, like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, only he wasn’t one of them, which is a pity as he is very sexy as well as being double-barrelled. This week’s winners are the first six I read — the others were all unlucky losers because I didn’t read any of them, and the bonus fiver goes to me because there is an offer on taramasalata down at Waitrose.
Brian Murdoch/Deborah Ross deputises for Lucy Vickery
No. 2767: parting shot
You are invited to imagine what the ‘famous last words’ of any well-known real or fictional character, alive or dead, might be/have been (up to five entries each). Email entries, wherever possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 3 October.
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