Diary – 27 March 2014

I had a slight shock last week, while listening to Desert Island Discs. The admirable nurse Dame Claire Bertschinger had chosen a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ as one of her eight discs. The poem, beautifully read by Michael Caine, was nearing its climax when it came to an abrupt stop. If you do this and that and the other, what…? Nothing. The final stanza, with its punch-line (‘Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it/And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!’) had been lopped off. I quite see that the poem may be too long to read in its entirety, but it would have been easy to skip the penultimate stanza. Whoever removed the last lines must be illiterate. Or could it be that he or she feared that airing Kipling’s words might offend the sensibilities of the more gender-sensitive members of the audience?

My wonderful tennis coach Paul and his wife are having their first baby next month. But they are not on speaking terms (or they weren’t last Wednesday). Why? Because Paul has refused point blank to go to any more National Childbirth Trust pre-natal classes. Here’s why. The first thing he was asked to do was write his name on a piece of paper, alongside his favourite food — but it had to be a food which begins with the same letter as his name. Paul wrote down ‘potato’, adding ‘roasted, with gravy’. The pieces of paper were then handed round among the eight couples present, so that they could all get to know each other. This process took 35 minutes. (The classes last for two hours, from 7.30 p.m. to 9.30 p.m.) Next he was given a little plastic baby and a little plastic pelvis to play with, so that he could discover the best way to manoeuvre the baby through the pelvis (during this activity, which went on for 40 minutes, the men were taken into a separate room).