Royal gaffes, writers’ mottoes and mating bug

In the 1960s I lived in Hampstead, though all these years I have managed not to write a novel about Hampstead dinner-parties. The area was, and still is, rich in second-hand bookshops. There was one bookseller, long since dead, whose shop I used to visit, not to buy books, but to listen to his talk. Let us call him Turner Paige. He never stopped talking to his customers, in an interminable, E. L. Wisty-like drone, and every sentence was a priceless platitude. I used to stand in front of the shelves, pretending to browse, but inwardly gurgling with laughter as one clunking truism followed another. This was the sort of thing:

Charles Dickens was a great comic writer. When he wanted to, he hit the funny-bone every time. But he was a great tragic writer, too: no one caught better the ‘still, sad music of humanity’.

Of the little stocking-filler books this year, one of the funniest is Corgi and Bess: More Wit and Wisdom from the House of Windsor edited by Thomas Blaikie (Fourth Estate, £9.99) — funny precisely because, as with Mr Paige’s anecdotes, most of the quotations selected are breathtakingly banal. They have absolutely no punchlines: shaggy corgi stories.

An earlier book by Blaikie, to which this is a sequel, was You Look Awfully Like the Queen: Wit and Wisdom from the House of Windsor. It received some warm reviews (‘We are amused’, Daily Mail). I can only suppose that Blaikie used up most of the good stories in it, because with few exceptions those in the new book are gems of vapidity. When I laughed at them, I was laughing at the notion that anyone could think they would make anyone else laugh. Three examples, to see if you agree with me:

When, in the 1950s, Lady Pamela Berry came to inspect the arrangements for a fashion show to be attended by the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, she said, ‘What are these chairs?’ referring to two throne-like items which had been provided for the Royal persons.