Humour

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How long must I wait to tuck in?

Q. I am always making or receiving phone calls which get cut off. When I ring the person back their line is engaged as they are trying to ring me too. Mary, whose responsibility is it to ring back when a call has been disturbed in this way? Can you use your immense authority to rule, once and for all? — A.B., London W8 A. The person who initiated the call is duty bound to ring back. It was they who made the overture in the first place and they who presumably have something to say to you. There is no implied hostility in your failure to ring them back.

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Is there any way to wriggle out of a phone invitation?

Q. Is there a tactful way to keep one social offer on hold while waiting to see if you have made the cut for something ‘better’ you know to be happening on the same date? It’s easy enough if the invitation comes in by email or letter, but not when you are put on the spot by someone ringing up. This happened the other day and the caller, a slightly bullying woman, sensed that I was prevaricating and said, ‘I don’t want you to feel ambushed. Take your time, think about it.’ Not wanting to be rude, I quickly accepted immediately. Inevitably the invitation for the preferred event came in

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Was Flann O’Brien at his best when writing about drink? (Answers on a damp stressed envelope, please)

On his deathbed in Dublin in the spring of 1966, Flann O’Brien must have been squiffy from tots of Paddy. A bottle of the amber distillate was smuggled in to the hospital on April Fool’s Day by a couple of well-wishers. O’Brien rang the bell to summon a nurse. ‘Sister,’ he told her solemnly, ‘I have two friends who are constipated and need a dose. Would you bring two glasses?’ Within a matter of hours the poker-faced Count O’Blather (O’Brien’s preferred authorial pseudonym) was dead. Flanneurs everywhere had reason to lament the passing of a notable Dublin wit and a writer of comic genius. But all was not lost. O’Brien’s

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How to stop cinema iPhone pests

Q. At a private screening of a documentary about the artist David Bomberg, a woman sitting near me in the hand-picked audience carried on using her iPhone to send and receive messages. She had the phone on silent but was generating a rival source of light to the screen we were all supposed to be watching. Thus we could not fully concentrate. Was there an elegant way I might have put a stop to this insensitive behaviour? What would you have said, Mary? — S.H-H., London SW3 A. There is no need to say anything. Cinema usherettes of yore would curb rowdy or undesirable behaviour in the stalls by shining

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold: Child-friendly, sex-free, nut-heavy – just the hotel for my 40th birthday

Woolley Grange is a child-friendly country house hotel that seems, at first, entirely monstrous — a grey Tudor house in Wiltshire, with gables like teeth and a pond outside, possibly haunted. It is like a smiling wife who bares her fangs and eats the car park and all the Hondas within; a cinematic fiend of a house, in fact, but I am only reading Hilary Mantel these days, and she has the gift of bestowing menace on everything — clingfilm, envelopes, nuts. A country house hotel doesn’t stand a chance. We are here because it is New Year’s Eve. It is my 40th birthday, A has decided that he hates

Mark Steyn

Global warming’s glorious ship of fools

Yes, yes, just to get the obligatory ‘of courses’ out of the way up front: of course ‘weather’ is not the same as ‘climate’; and of course the thickest iciest ice on record could well be evidence of ‘global warming’, just as 40-and-sunny and a 35-below blizzard and 12 degrees and partly cloudy with occasional showers are all apparently manifestations of ‘climate change’; and of course the global warm-mongers are entirely sincere in their belief that the massive carbon footprint of their rescue operation can be offset by the planting of wall-to-wall trees the length and breadth of Australia, Britain, America and continental Europe. But still: you’d have to have

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

RIP: Simon Hoggart. The finest and funniest sketch writer to date

Terribly saddened to hear of the death of Simon Hoggart, a lovely writer and to my mind the finest and funniest purveyor of the House of Commons sketch that we have seen. I saw Simon, surprisingly, in concert in Canterbury, around about this time last year, delighting the audience with anecdotes from his many years watching politicians talk rubbish. We went for a curry afterwards and he seemed on good form, if frail from the punishing bouts of chemotherapy. He was a hugely gifted writer; certainly, the only writer in the English language who could tempt me to read anything about wine, other than the words ‘half price £4.99’. His

Thursday

John Preston

Curtains for kitty! How to care for cats — and how to kill them

The New Yorker has always had a peculiar affinity with cats, perhaps because they have a lot in common — an elegance, an abhorrence of sentimentality and an innate sense of superiority. The Big New Yorker Book of Cats is full of cats and owners, each holding one another at arm’s length and peering through invisible lorgnettes. Pulitzer prizewinner Susan Sheehan writes about a tabby cat called Pynchon, owned by the proprietor of a Manhattan bookshop. Pynchon, who for unspecified reasons arrived in New York ‘with no front claws’, is fond of listening to classical music on the radio and regularly attends meetings of the James Joyce Society at the

Sebastian Payne

Hugo Rifkind’s My Week reminds me why it’s worth getting up on Saturdays

‘Nothing’s funny any more’ has become the daily mantra of this magazine’s cartoon editor, Michael Heath. Thanks to Leveson, political correctness, taste and common decency, lampooning public figures in particular has become more difficult than ever. Hugo Rifkind still has the right idea. From the despair of trying to conjure up a column for the Times’s Saturday edition, he came up with ‘My Week’, and these diaries, in which he takes aim at someone — usually in politics — who has dominated the news, are now the first thing many people turn to. This compilation brings together his best sketches in an enticing bible of satire. The merriment gained from

Thursday

Mark Mason

Through It All I’ve Always Laughed, by Count Arthur Strong – review

Fans of Count Arthur Strong (and yes I know he’s so Marmite you could spread him on a cheese sandwich) love the failed performer because he does what we all dream of: ranting at others to cover our own mistakes. At the same time he reminds us what a fool this makes one look, so as well as being an entertainer he’s a cautionary tale. The warning is now available in book form, Through It All I’ve Always Laughed. If you’re unfamiliar with the Count’s work you should probably sample him on radio or television first. Converts, however, will relish the revelations about what made Strong the man, the legend,

David Sexton

One Leg Too Few may be one biography too many

It’s no joke, writing about comedians. Their work is funny, their lives are not. Rightly honouring the former while accurately relaying the disasters of the latter is a challenge few writers can well meet. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore have been extensively studied before. Harry Thompson published his excellent biography of Cook in 1997, Barbara Paskin her authorised biography of Moore the same year; Alexander Games’s joint biography Pete & Dud followed in 1999. There have been memoirs of Peter Cook by his first and second wives, Wendy and Judy, and his third wife, Lin, has edited Something Like Fire: Peter Cook Remembered. What’s to add? William Cook (no relation)

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

The best funny books for Christmas

Books do furnish a room, and quirky books for Christmas do furnish an enormous warehouse somewhere within easy reach of the M25. There are more of them than ever this year, some purportedly comic, some wilfully trivial, a few of them uncategorisable in their oddness, but all of them have one thing in common: they will be outsold by the Hairy Bikers’ diet book. Anyone who tells you that the world is a just and fair place has never written a quirky book for Christmas. In the still popular trivia category — which has survived the stark retraction of the Ben Schott empire — two books stand out. The Unbelievable

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

My 50 weddings

A couple of weekends ago, I went to my 50th wedding. Everyone I have mentioned this to has pulled a rather strange face, as though to say, ‘You count the weddings you go to? What unhinged variety of cross-eyed lunatic does that?’ But like so much of lasting value in life, this began with a conversation in a pub. Back in 1997, I was moaning to my old friend Terence about how many weddings I was having to go to. People I knew simply wouldn’t stop getting married. So how many in all? asked Terence. I don’t know, said I. It could, and probably should, have ended there. But the

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke: The day I walked into a postcard

This time last year the postman delivered a picture postcard depicting a village square in Provence. The photograph on the front of that postcard was contemporary, but the colours were digitally manipulated to invest the image with a nostalgic, hand-tinted, vintage air. The square was eerily deserted. No customers were seated at the tables under the gay sunshades set out under the trees. Time stood still. I’d never been there. I hadn’t even heard of the place. And yet the square and its forsaken tables seemed oddly familiar. The photograph transmitted a nostalgic sweetness which was almost sinister. An invitation was implied. ‘Come!’ the picture seemed to be saying. ‘Life!

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I stop this bore reading his novel aloud?

Q. Is there a polite way of halting a wannabe novelist from reading his oeuvre aloud to an unwilling audience? A neighbour on the residents’ committee happened to be leaving as friends were arriving for drinks and I felt I should invite him to join us. It was all going swimmingly until he told someone he was writing a novel, and she made the mistake of pretending she would be interested in reading it. No one had reckoned on this (very insensitive) man having a copy of the wretched thing on his iPhone and he read aloud at length, pausing only to laugh at his own genius. It killed the

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language: Who says there’s a ‘correct name’ for the penis?

In a very rum letter to the Daily Telegraph, the Mother’s Union of all people joined with some other bodies to demand that ‘primary schools should teach the correct names for genitalia’. What can they mean? A confederate of the Mother’s Union in this campaign, the Sex Education Forum, says that by the age of seven, children should name ‘external genitalia’. From examples supplied, it seems to want us all to speak Latin. It’s as if we should no longer say womb but uterus, not skull but cranium, not big toe but hallux. By using Latin names for genitalia, the campaigners hope to avoid ‘perpetuating shame’. I wonder whether they

Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray’s diary: My gay wedding dance-off with Julie Burchill

The pilot refuses to get going until everyone is seated and quiet. When we take off there are raucous cheers. I am on a midday budget-airline flight to Ibiza. Louder cheers welcome the drinks trolleys which are noisily ransacked. Along from my seat a gentleman is reading The Spectator. It transpires we are heading for the same occasion. The ceremony takes place on a raked clifftop amphitheatre on the beautiful and quiet north side of the island. Boiling sun, cliffs and glittering sea boast the backdrop. Assembled friends and family swelter in the full lamp glare of the sun. I keep my jacket on. Though this may sound like sunstroke,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What must I do to reclaim the best poolside chair?

Q. I know this seems petty but last year, on our villa holiday, my brother-in-law always took the best chair at the pool. This was a teak lounger with flat armrests on which books or drinks could be rested, and an adjustable section to prop up the knees. Everyone else was on plastic numbers. If anyone deserved the best chair, it should have been me, his host, who he knows has two dodgy knees. My sister is sensitive about him, so direct criticism or even teasing are out of the question as the whole topic is too combustible. Any suggestions, Mary? We are taking the same villa again this year.

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Why it’s fine to crash funerals

Q. Regarding the writing of ‘no presents’ on an invitation (Dear Mary, 6 July), my own experience is that many people ignore ‘no presents’ anyway. Some will not even ask for ideas, and you are likely to be inundated with cushions with ‘Still sexy at 60’ embossed on them and huge mugs yelling ‘Keep calm and carry on’ in bold colours. To pre-empt this, your correspondent’s wife might do better to send a round-robin email to all those invited saying she forgot to write ‘no presents’, but should anyone like to, they could donate to a charity of their choice. I think Ukip might ruffle a few feathers. — J.F.,

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I stop friends from coming to my book launch?

Q.  I have far too many friends to be able to invite them all to my forthcoming book launch. How can I cull the numbers without causing grave offence? — Name withheld, Edinburgh A. Ask the publisher’s PR to send invitations from her own email address. The subject box should read ‘Invitation to a party to launch…’ followed by the title of your book, which, usually, will leave insufficient room for your name. Those who bother to click open the attachment will see that the invitation concerns you, but chances are that busy people will consign the email to spam or simply scroll past it without opening. Thus were the