69 for 1 Read online

  By the same author

  The Dog it Was That Died

  All Except the Bastard

  The Sanity Inspector

  Golfing for Cats

  The Collected Bulletins of Idi Amin

  The Further Bulletins of Idi Amin

  The Lady From Stalingrad Mansions

  The Peanut Papers

  The Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz

  Tissues for Men

  The Best of Alan Coren

  The Cricklewood Diet

  Bumf

  Present Laughter (Editor)

  Something for the Weekend?

  Bin Ends

  Seems Like Old Times

  More Like Old Times

  A Year in Cricklewood

  Toujours Cricklewood

  Alan Coren’s Sunday Best

  Animal Passions (Editor)

  A Bit on the Side

  The Cricklewood Dome

  The Alan Coren Omnibus

  Waiting for Jeffrey

  For children

  Buffalo Arthur

  The Lone Arthur

  Arthur the Kid

  Railroad Arthur

  Klondike Arthur

  Arthur’s Last Stand

  Arthur and the Great Detective

  Arthur and the Bellybutton Diamond

  Arthur v the Rest

  Arthur and the Purple Panic

  Contents

  1 69 FOR 1

  2 BEYOND OUR KEN

  3 LOW COUNTRY

  4 SHELL GAME

  5 ALL QUIET ON THE CHARITY FRONT

  6 SEE HOW THEY RUN

  7 SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN

  8 NOT FOUND, WANTING

  9 GLOSS FINISH

  10 WALL GAME

  11 SMART MONEY

  12 RADIO FUN

  13 A BIT ON THE SIDE

  14 A NOSE BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SMELL AS SWEET

  15 REGIME CHANGE

  16 ON A WING AND A PRAYER

  17 CHOCS AWAY

  18 GREEN THOUGHTS

  19 SEA FEVER

  20 ANYTHING LEGAL CONSIDERED

  21 DIAL M FOR MONEY

  22 WHAT DID ME IN THE HOLIDAYS

  23 WRIST ASSESSMENT

  24 ANY OLD IRON

  25 GOOD G*LLY!

  26 MANIFOLD PRESSURES

  27 CHINESE PUZZLE

  28 TRICK QUESTIONS

  29 ANIMAL CRACKERS

  30 PLUG UGLY

  31 UNFIT FOR PURPOSE

  32 A LITTLE TOUCH OF HARRY

  33 BANG TO RIGHTS

  34 ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

  35 THE REST IS HISTORY

  36 WHEN YOU AND I WERE YOUNG, MAGGIE

  37 THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN

  38 TIME CHECK

  39 NOW WE ARE SEX

  40 CHICKEN RUN

  41 AUSTEN SEVEN

  42 ANY GOD WILL DO

  43 HOW HEAVY IS THAT DOGGIE IN THE WINDOW?

  44 GROWING PAINS

  45 OLYMPIC STANDARDS

  46 A STAR IS BORN

  47 JUST A TICK

  48 GIFT HORSES

  49 GOING GOING

  50 CHRISTMAS LIST

  51 LIE BACK AND THINK OF CRICKLEWOOD

  52 SHELF LIFE

  53 THE FOLKS WHO LIVE ON THE HILL

  54 POLES APART

  55 RHINESTONES ARE FOREVER

  56 HAIR TODAY

  57 EINSTEIN GETS THE BIRD

  58 CHILD’S PLAY

  59 VICTORY ROLE

  60 ALMOST A GENTLEMAN

  61 ONE FLU OVER THE CHICKEN’S NEST

  62 TIME OUT

  63 STANDS ENGLAND WHERE IT DID?

  64 ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE

  65 MARCHING ON MY STOMACH

  66 PRIVATE LIVES

  67 MAD ABOUT THE BOY

  68 ME AND MY SHADOW

  69 LOSING YOUR BOTTLE

  Copyright

  69 For 1

  YOU have just picked this up in your local bookshop, to have a bit of a flip, have a bit of a dip, possibly have a root around in your wallet – if I can give you some idea of what 69 For 1 means. Tricky. If I were Humpty Dumpty I might declare that it means just what I choose it to mean, and since I have, as you will shortly hear, much in common with Humpty Dumpty, I suppose I could leave it at that; but I shan’t, because you might irritably snap the book shut and look for something by a less arrogant hack.

  69 For 1 means two things – neither of them sexual, since you ask, otherwise it would be called 69 For 2 – and the first thing it means is that 69 pieces constitute 1 book. The second thing is that the author of these pieces has just become 69. Nothing to celebrate there, you say, no kind of milestone, but it is for me, because I nearly didn’t become it. Last year, I was very nearly 68 all out. That is the much I have in common with Humpty Dumpty; the one thing we do not, fortunately, have in common, is that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were able to put me together again. Or, rather, all the king’s physicians, surgeons, anaesthetists, radiographers, nurses, etc, since had it been left to his horses, I should unquestionably have been done for.

  What nearly did that, mind, nobody knows for sure; but on a hot summer’s night last year, spotting me in the French moonlight, something bit me as I snored: could have been a gnat, could have been a scorpion, could have been a werewolf, it left no note, merely a breach into which a billion opportunist streptococci plunged and set up a colony called Septicaemia. It is an inclement little country, where your flesh falls off, thanks to the national sport: sassy newspapers call it necrotising fasciitis, the red-tops prefer flesh-eating disease, but however you slice it, slicing it is what has to be done, and within a couple of hours that is what the terrific surgeons of Nice’s Hôpital Saint-Roche were doing.

  They put my conked-out organs on a lot of machines to do it, too, and kept me on them for ages, seriously threatening the French National Grid: a thousand kilometres away, Parisian diners would glance up from their soupe de poisson and wonder why the lights were flickering.

  I stayed in the coma for a month, and while, when I eventually emerged, it was a considerable relief to my dearest – who had become even more my nearest by putting their lives on hold in order to be there for mine – it was something of a disappointment, too. For by Hollywood tradition, when a month-long sleeper emerges from his coma, he either cries ‘Hallo trees! Hallo sky!’ to his surrounding loved ones, or else explains to them that he had the near-death experience of floating through a long tunnel at the end of which (in my case, at least) James Thurber and Bernard Levin were waiting with a dry martini to welcome him aboard and direct him to the wingmakers.

  According, however, to Mrs Coren and my children, my first words were ‘Get me a hand-grenade!’, because, they discovered as I gabbled on, I had got it into my comatose head that I was in occupied France, and the Boche were at the gate, drawn thither by collaborators who had spotted the shortwave radio in the cardboard suitcase under my bed.

  Fortunately, my clapped-out mind was eventually set at rest, and returned with my repairing body to England, where it soon became 69. So I am the one for which 69 is. I did think of calling the book 69 Not Out, but then I had this feeling that I’d already tempted providence enough.

  Beyond Our Ken

  IN the high and far off times, Best Beloved, before the good Lord smiled upon him and made him my gracious Mayor, Ken Livingstone and I both lived in Cricklewood, a stone’s throw from one another; though this distance, despite the occasional temptation, was never actually verified. Since then we have both moved closer to the epicentre of the fiefdom he has made all his own, but, because you may take the boy out of Cricklewood but not Cricklewood out of the boy, our paths, I find, have crossed again. Yokels both, each had his dream of the metropolis; but, heartbreakingly,
they have turned out to be very different dreams. I never guessed: though I have run into him a fair few times since those idyllic peripolitan days, mostly when we were engaged upon daft broadcast parlour games concerned with bluff, deceit and guesswork – at all of which Ken unsurprisingly proved to be brilliantly adept – we never talked about these dreams of ours. But it is time to talk of them now, before it is too late for either of us.

  The Mayor, I learn from an exhibition at his shiny new City Hall, has a vision of transfiguring the Marylebone Road: he wishes it not only to become London’s Champs-Elysées but to be connected via Regent’s Park to Primrose Hill, a mile or so to its north, by a further broad boulevard, and by a yet further broader one, to Bankside in the south. Ken’s field of dreams is the Fields of Heaven. Silly arse.

  Do I hear you cry that this slur is as gratuitously offensive as it is utterly baffling, given that the very place where I now hang my Cricklewood hat-collection lies bang in the middle of Regent’s Park, between Primrose Hill and the Marylebone Road, exactly equidistant from each and thus the very nub of what will be the wondrous Champs Livingstone? How can I not relish the notion of, any day now, springing down my front steps on a fine summer morning, twirling my malacca cane, to join the elegant throng of coutured boulevardiers strolling the broad avenues beneath the sighing shade-trees, pausing only to tip my panama and exchange charming compliments and scintillating ripostes before popping in to take a filtre et fine at any one of a hundred fashionable pavement cafes, every one of them packed to the geranium gunwales with the artists and writers and singers and actors who have flocked here from all over the world? Oh, look, isn’t that Pablo Hirst doodling dots on a menu that will make his waiter rich, even as, beside him, F. Scott Amis explains to Salman Hemingway that the rich are different from you and me, while his wife Zelda pirouettes naked atop a passing taxi (‘You’ll never guess who I had on the roof of the cab last week’), and blow me down if that isn’t Gertrude Rowling telling Enrico Manilow that a nose is a nose is a nose, to the delighted doeskin-clad clapping of some 83 of the ravishing catwalk soubrettes who have recently appeared in The Vagina Monologues and are therefore here this morning to pose for the magic brush of Rolf de Toulouse-Lautrec.

  Oh, get off! ‘This is London’, as Britain used to Morse to France in the days when the Champs-Elysées teemed shoulder-to-shoulder with marching Nazis, delighted to have found a street roomy enough to do their thing in; because the Champs-Elysées, may I remind Ken, is six times wider than the Marylebone Road. Indeed, it has more than once occurred to me that Hitler may well have abandoned his 1940 invasion plans for no better reason than that London’s main thoroughfares were so narrow: had they all parachuted onto Hampstead Heath, as was mooted, it is more than likely that the German Army would have jackbooted into gridlock halfway down Finchley Road, where they would have been picked off like fish in a barrel.

  So then, where do I begin, if I am to list the doubts about the end to which Ken’s vision might bring us? With the kinds of catering establishments bound to be clogging the skimpy pavements bordering the already sclerotic tarmac, al fresco Burger Kings and Pizza Huts, KFCs and Kebaboramas, Starbucks and Bella Pastas and Slug & Lettuces? With their rowdy 24/7 lagered clientele, undraped beer-bellies lobstering in the sun, gobbing at the stationary traffic four feet from the table they are waiting to throw at the Man U chara-convoy which cellphoned pickets have told them is just coming off the M1? With the million class-actions brought by fast-food, booze and fag addicts, not to mention as many diesel-wheezers, hoping to empty the coffers of the man who, at a stroke, doubled their exposure to all of the above? Maybe that alone will stay his hand.

  But it may not help. I hear there is an alternative plan to demolish the flood-barriers and let the Thames fill London. Why not? It worked for Venice.

  Low Country

  DURING a recent fireside chat, my dear chum Libby Purves made my spirits soar. Not, of course, for the first time; but never yet so aptly, since what she was addressing was what makes spirits plummet, and what to do about it. Despite the dispiriting news that 31 million prescriptions were last year scrawled for them, she was tooting the horn for antidepressants. Purves says Prozac’s all right.

  Now, I am not normally depressed. But as shades of the pension house begin to close upon the growing boy, there are moments when I find myself staring into drizzle which isn’t actually there; and yesterday, willy-nilly, it started coming down cats and dogs, because, before I ran into Libby, I had just read the Essex University report claiming that a better cure for depression than pills was a walk in the country.

  My boots filled with sunken heart: for if I ever get depressed enough to need a walk in the country, I shall come home twice as depressed as I was before. I have done walks in the country when I was not at all depressed, and though I would set off like Julie Andrews, I would come back like Edvard Munch. That is because nothing makes me glummer than not knowing anything, and nothing has anything I know less about than the country. The country is another country: they do things differently there.

  Oh, look, a tree. A larch? A beech? A birch? To me, they are as indistinguishable as the Wodehouse butlers they might as well be. The only tree I can identify is a horse-chestnut, but only if it has conkers on. What bird was that? I have a field guide, let me look it up, did it have a red speck on its beak, a green flash on its tail? It shot by like a feathered bullet, so who can say? Was it ‘plink-plink-plink’ it trilled, or ‘tok-tok-tok’? Have I just seen an auk?

  Aha, a field! Meadow? Dale? Wold? Let me negotiate this stile for a better view, if only of the nearest chiropractor. See, there are wild flowers! Of some kind. Possibly a variety of wort. I have heard there are a lot. Shall I eat this berry? Is it a sloe, a hip, or a thing for which the only antidote has immediately to be flown in from Sarawak? And might this be a farmer’s dog bounding towards me? When will it stop bounding? Where is the bloody farmer? Is the dog protecting a cow which has appeared between me and the stile, or is it drawing a bull’s attention to a vulnerable limper? Let me pop through this hedge which, goodness me, has so prettily grown over a barbed wire fence; was it as much fun as this on the Somme?

  But see, with 34 bounds I am free! I never liked that jacket anyhow, it stood between me and the bracing chill of sleet, and hopping furrows on one boot must do wonders for something, because that is what the country is all about. It is very possibly what inspired Eli Lilly to hobble home to his snug, dungfree, gnatless, urban laboratory one soaking night and invent Prozac.

  Shell Game

  HERE is a little riddle to keep you occupied until you’re ready for the next paragraph: what’s twice the price of caviar and travels at half a mile an hour?

  Well, clever old you. Fancy knowing that. I didn’t know it until just a few minutes back, because I am more old than clever, and thus all I know is that 53 years ago what travelled at half a mile an hour was only twice the price of wine gums. And I know this because that is exactly what I paid for it.

  Shall we extrapolate some quite remarkable facts from this? Such as the fact that what I once paid a shilling for is in all probability still travelling, and in covering, where’s that calculator, 239,000 miles, not only has it not worn out, it has made itself worth 22,000 times more than I shelled out for it. Shelled out, for those who fell at the riddle hurdle, not coughed up: I’m helping you as much as I can. You’ll agree that that is one hell of an investment; at least, it would be if I knew where it was, but since it has gone around the world ten times since I last saw it, it could be anywhere. Sorry, I don’t want to mislead you, nor to exaggerate – those two authentic statistics having already made a mockery of exaggeration – it couldn’t be anywhere in the world, it could only be anywhere in Britain, and mainland Britain, at that. Because not only is it worth its weight in gold, it has the same buoyancy. It cannot handle sea. It sinks.

  Now, on the outside chance that there may be a handful among those beaten by both the riddle and the subsequent
big fat clue who have not yet, miraculously, lost patience with all of this and turned gratefully to Jilly Cooper, where readers do not get mucked about, come with me, those few minutes back, to Palmer’s Pet Stores in Camden Town. I am standing outside it, because I have not come to Camden Town to buy a pet, I have come to buy a leg of lamb, and you cannot buy a leg of lamb in Palmer’s – unless, I suppose, it is still attached, this is the world’s greatest pet shop, it does everything – but, as I stand outside, an idea sidles into my head. It sidles there because I have stood here before, in the sweet lang syne of 1950, with a birthday shilling hot in my hand. Thus I did not, on this latter morning, pass on to the butcher’s, I went into Palmer’s.

  ‘Do you,’ I said, ‘still sell tortoises?’

  ‘Upstairs,’ said the assistant. ‘Turn right at the spiders.’

  So I did. It wasn’t easy: what he should have said was turn green at the spiders, because these were no ordinary spiders, these were giant crabs in ginger wigs, these were octopod kittens, but I edged by somehow, and there, in the room next door, in a titchy glass box, was something about an inch across. I put my reading glasses on. It was a tortoise, all right. It may have looked up at me. It was hard to tell; it could have been lifting its tail.

  ‘Do you have anything larger?’ I said. ‘I might lose this little chap in the garden; he could be trodden on, he could be swallowed by a cat, he could be lifted by a crow. He might even be dragged away by ants.’

  ‘She,’ said the salesman (what eyesight!), ‘isn’t ready for the garden yet. You’d have to keep her in a vivarium until she was big enough to look after herself. It’d take a good few years, mind.’

  ‘How much is she?’ I asked.

  ‘£300,’ he replied.

  You all know what I said next, after I had steadied myself on the counter and stared at him for a bit, because you have been there with me. ‘The last tortoise I bought here,’ I said, ‘cost me a shilling.’

  ‘How much was a shilling?’ he said.

  ‘Put it this way,’ I said, ‘for £300 in 1950, I could’ve bought six thousand tortoises. I’d be rich man now. I’d be worth two million quid. Make that five million: mine was as big as a brick. You could mistake this one for a snail.’