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  ‘Yours would have been imported,’ said the assistant. ‘They used to come in by the truckload, but there’s laws now. This one was born and bred here. She’s English.’

  ‘I’ll keep my voice down, then,’ I said. ‘I’d hate to upset her. Don’t you think £300 is a bit steep for a tortoise the size of my watch?’

  ‘She’s cheaper than a pedigree dog,’ he said. ‘Buy a puppy for £300, it’ll live 15 years. If you’re lucky. That’s £20 a year. This tortoise could live to 100. So each year costs only three quid.’ He grinned. ‘Also, on your reckoning, she could be worth a couple of billion by then.’

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ I said, ‘but there’s just one snag.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I’d have to live to 165,’ I said, and I went out, and round the corner, and got change out of a tenner. You know where you are, with a leg of lamb.

  All Quiet On The Charity Front

  AS you know, many supermarkets, local authorities, and even some branches of the Royal British Legion have stopped issuing pins with poppies this year, lest people not merely prick their fingers, but also claim compensation for wounds. Understandable, given these poignant memoirs of one veteran Poppy Day survivor, which I make no excuse, on this special day, for quoting:

  There was three of us up there that morning, in the thick of it as per usual, me, Chalky White and Nobby Clarke. The rain was coming down stair-rods, the wind went through you like a wossname, knife, but the mud was the worst. Slip off the pavement and you was done for; the lads do not call white vans whizz-bangs for nothing, you never hear the one that gets you.

  Anyway, we was all keeping our heads down, because there was poppy-sellers all over; they’d moved up in the night and now they was in position everywhere, but you couldn’t hardly see most of them, they are crafty buggers, you got to give them that, you see an empty doorway, you reckon you’re all right, and suddenly they spring out from nowhere, they are on you before you know it. That is how they got Chalky that morning: we was creeping along, staying close to the wall, we was all but at the pub, we could hear blokes getting ’em in, we could smell roll-ups, and then Chalky only goes and sticks his head over the top for a shufti, and suddenly me and Nobby hears that terrible rattle what is like nothing else on God’s earth, and poor old Chalky finds hisself looking down the wrong end of a collecting tin.

  Course, me and Nobby stood up as well, it is one for all and all for one in our mob, and we marched out, heads up, bags of swank, and Chalky shouts: ‘Wiffel ist es, Kamerad?’ because he has always been a bit of a wag, he does not let things get him down, nil carborundum, and this woman takes his ten pee and she gives him one of them looks they have, they are not like us, never will be, and hands him a poppy and a pin, and he says, ‘Aren’t you going to pin it on for me, Fraulein?’ and she says, ‘You want a lot for ten pee,’ so I say, ‘Leave it out, Chalky, it is not worth it, I’ll do it, come here,’ and I hold the poppy against his lapel and I take the pin and Chalky says, ‘Is this the Big Push they’re always going on about?’ and I laugh so much that the pin goes and sticks right in my finger.

  Blood gushed out. I must have lost very nearly a blob. ‘Stone me!’ yells Nobby. ‘That is a Blighty one and no mistake. You will have to go straight home and put an Elastoplast on it.’ Chalky looks at the woman. ‘This is the bravest man I know,’ he says. ‘He has got his knees brown, he has done his bit, but that does not mean he likes the taste of cold steel up him. Look at that finger of his. It will not grow old as we that are left grow old. It may very well end up with a little scar on it. It might even turn sceptic and drop off into some corner of a foreign wossname, he will never be able to find it. So gimme my ten pee back.’

  At this, despite the agony and spots before the eyes, I wade in, too; do not call me a hero, mind, I was just doing what any man would do in the circumstances, you would do the same. ‘As soon I get this finger seen to,’ I inform her, ‘I shall be using it to dial my brief!’

  At this, she lets out a shriek, chucks the ten pee at us, and runs off. Typical or what? They do not have no bottle, poppy-sellers: oh, sure, they may look hot as mustard quartered safe behind their lines, parading up and down outside Harrods in their spotless Barbours and their cashmere twinsets, with the sun winking off of their diamand brooches, and all smelling of Channel 4, but it is a very different matter up the sharp end in Lewisham, there is more to poppying out here than bull and bloody blanco. Me and Nobby and Chalky watched her skedaddle, and we gave a bit of a cheer, and then Nobby took my feet and Chalky held me under the arms, and they carried me past a number of material witnesses into the Rat and Cockle, and Chalky went off to get them in, and Nobby lit a fag and put it in my mouth, and he said: ‘Could have been worse, mate – suppose it had been her what had stuck it in Chalky? He would have been pushing up daisies by now.’

  ‘She might have got both of you,’ I said. Nobby shook his head. ‘No chance. One of ’em tried once, caught me off guard, took a quid off of me and before I could stop her she had shoved a pin straight through my lapel. It might have done me serious mischief if it wasn’t for the Bible I always keep in my breast-pocket. I found it in a hotel bedroom, you know.’

  ‘Bloody lucky,’ I said. ‘It could so easily have been a towel.’

  ‘Or a rubber shower-mat,’ said Chalky, setting down the drinks.

  ‘A man needs a bit of luck,’ said Nobby, ‘out here.’

  See How They Run

  IT is a sobering thought – unless you tied on something so celebratory last night as to leave you squinting at this through one throbbing eye, in which case a raw egg in a quart of espresso would doubtless serve you better – that if Athens had been only a mile down the road as Pheidippides flew, you would have had nothing to celebrate, since Sir Ranulph Fiennes would have spent last week at home with his feet up, watching Countdown. He would not have been blistering those feet around the world, 26 miles and 385 yards at a time, in his madcap triumph of running a marathon on seven continents in seven days, because there would be no such thing as a marathon.

  He is not the first person to be have been driven nuts by this poxy event: click on almost any channel at almost any time, and chances are you will see thousands gasping through Wigan or Amarillo or Ulan Bator, variously got up as Napoleon and King Kong and Donald Duck and sucking on Volvic teats, while night begins to fold them in soft wings, because many hours have passed since the winner breasted the tape and went off to sign fat contracts with Lucozade or Nike. No other athletics’ contest attracts losers the way the marathon does: you will not see spindly men in George Bush masks and sequinned tutus queuing up to put the shot a tad further, with any luck, than their toe, nor diving-suited crackpots trying to pole-vault a bar challengingly set at three inches, nor pantomime horses containing two fat grannies lumbering asymmetrically towards a sandpit for what might just become the sextuple jump, if they ever get there alive. But convene a marathon, and anything goes; for the most part slowly, and too often facetiously.

  Yet worse – because, when it is merely a telly being plodded across, we idling pizza-gobblers may staunch our couchbound guilt with a swift athletic jab on the remote – is that real-life full-size marathoners are all out there, all the time, obsessively training in the pitiably inextinguishable hope of, someday, coming in 963rd. You cannot, these days, take an unobstructed stroll down any street: be sure that something wet and wheezing will either be clumping towards you, forcing you aside (since it cannot deviate, for fear of knocking a precious nano-second off its eight-hour target), or, far horribler, invisibly panting up behind you on thumping feet, forcing you to wonder whether there’s enough time to swallow your mobile and disappear your wallet between your trembling buttocks before the lead pipe falls.

  Even if you’re not on the pavement but sealed in your car, they are still unavoidable. Try to ignore them as they suddenly spring out from the kerb – because jogging on the spot at the red light might ruin their chance of getting bac
k to the office clock in the qualifying time required for them to represent Morgan Sachs against Goldman Waterhouse in this year’s Pork Belly Futures Marathon – and they will, at the very least, scream and shout and throw their half-eaten bananas at you, or, at the very most, fly somersaulting off your nearside wing and make a nasty dent in your no-claims bonus.

  Nor are the odds against their running into you any longer if you stay indoors. You will be on the easeful point, perhaps, of uncorking a little light lunch, when the doorbell rings, dragging you from your ottoman to a front step on which a man in a steaming vest is hopping up and down, either rattling a tin or waving a clipboard and pen. If it is the one with a tin, he is running from Potters Bar to Croydon and wants his money now, if it is the one with a clipboard and pen, he will be running from Croydon to Potters Bar next Tuesday and wants to come back for his money after he’s done it.

  Yes, yes, I know, don’t go snatching up your own pen, I do realise it isn’t his money, it will all go to charity, but that’s not the point. The point is that though marathons may be useful in raising funds, they are useless in themselves: Pheidippides was not just the first man with a good reason to run 26 miles and 385 yards, he was also the last. All the modern marathon does is encourage its hapless fans to pant themselves purple for hundreds of hours, because – let us not beat about the bush, which, indeed, many of them are dressed as – they enjoy it. By that token, I could stand in Oxford Street buttonholing shoppers with the news that I had just watched Friends in aid of the RSPCA, see this tin, please dig deep, or go (slowly) round with a clipboard and pen begging the doorstepped to support my attempt, next Tuesday, to eat a kilo of caviar for Oxfam – which I could do without getting in anyone’s way or frightening the horses. Moreover, lest you think me less than selfless, I’d be perfectly happy to do it in a luminous thong and antlers.

  Suffer Little Children

  YES, of course today’s farrago is going to be about children no longer falling out of trees. You know the way I work: within seconds of my clocking what the NHS sees as this wonderful news in Monday’s papers, my trouser leg was rolled up and my finger running along my shin and down the arches of the years. To end up, as you see, on my keyboard.

  It’s a knobbly johnny, this shin, and distinguishes me from Proust in that I do not need to dunk it in my tea to summon up the past: touching it, I touch again the just-plucked conkers in my plummeting grasp as Cecil Road leaps up to break me, I smell the sheets of Southgate Hospital, I hear the crackle of the nursing starch, I feel the itch beneath the plaster tube, all that.

  I can call up this nostalgic stuff from almost anywhere: my whole body is a monument to risky youth. See that scar over my eye? A cocoa wound. What you did was, you emptied the cocoa tin, punched a pin-prick in its bottom, put your thumb over the hole to prevent the coal-gas you’d filled the tin with from escaping, ran into the garden, put the tin on the wall, backed off, then threw a flaming ball of paper at it, so that it could fragment like a hand-grenade and slice off enough of your face to merit six stitches.

  See this scar in my left palm? Mobile phone wound. In 1950? All right, cocoa. What you did was, you emptied the cocoa tin, punched a pin-prick in its bottom, and threaded fifty yards of string through to attach to David Bunyan’s cocoa tin at Number 16, making, once you’d leant out of your two windows and stretched the string taut, two mobile phones. The tauter you stretched it, the better the reception. Until one mobile phone flew from your hand and went through your father’s greenhouse roof, enabling you to retrieve it for hardly more than six stitches.

  The scar in my right palm? How you punched holes in cocoa tins was with a jack-knife: to do it, you unfolded the spike for taking stones out of horses’ hooves, which, quite often, folded itself back as you punched. Just think what livid boyhood mementoes I might have earned, had I ever come across a limping horse!

  That little white dent in my thigh, since you ask, was caused by an air-gun pellet. It was aimed by John Paige at a squirrel in the allotments so that we could go to the town hall and get a shilling for its tail, thanks to food-rationing: people grew things which got eaten by squirrels, so you shot them and cut their tails off to prove it to the council. In principle.

  The big white dent in my thumb arrived soon after I told my father I was big enough to swing the Riley’s starting-handle without hurting myself.

  By the way, the NHS report which noted that tree-falling had gone down by 36 per cent in the last seven years also noted that RSI from computer games had gone up by 36 per cent. It’s something, I suppose, but hardly the stuff of memory.

  Not Found, Wanting

  A FAIR few years back, in Finchley Road underground station, I found myself standing on a platform. Not much of an opening sentence, is it? Not exactly a gripper, not likely to bring you to the edge of your seat, not the sort of opening sentence calculated to have the entire population, infant and adult, queuing outside Waterstone’s with their hearts pitter-pattering as Big Ben clunks towards midnight, frantic to know where that sentence might lead.

  But wait. This was no ordinary platform I was standing on. It was itself standing on a platform. I was standing on a platform on a platform. With a penny in my hand. Which, this being a fair few years back, was a big penny. It was going into a slot. And if yet further evidence were needed that this was a fair few years back, after it had gone into the slot a deep voice said: ‘You are ten stone seven pounds.’ It wouldn’t say it now: glance at the snapshot on this book’s jacket and you will see that the chins alone weigh close to that. But I shall never be able to find out what the big deep voice would say now, because there are no speak-your-weight machines any more.

  I speak this with the weight of authority. The authority is the Avery Historical Weighing Museum (oh yes there is), and even they haven’t got one. I rang them this morning after I had rung every scales’ manufacturer in the Yellow Pages to try to buy one, and the museum ruefully reported that they nearly got their hands on one a year or so ago, but the auctioneer knocked it down to an American for umpteen thousand pounds. Americans, it seems, collect them. It is hard to understand why: given the weight of most Americans, you would think they’d prefer to keep quiet about it, rather than have a thing on their premises shouting ‘You are 290 pounds and you are killing both of us!’, especially if the bathroom window is open.

  Why did I do all this telephoning? Because I have a friend of a certain age who has a birthday coming up, and who has been advised of the uncertainty of age and the risk of future birthdays not coming up unless he loses weight, and I thought it might be both the action of a friend and a bit of fun to buy him a machine which would verbally encourage slimming. That and the fact that there’s not much else to buy old fat blokes. But I have been thwarted, and since I do not take lightly to thwarting, I have also been thinking: why, when they were everywhere when I was young, are there no speak-your-weight machines any more?

  Is it because we, running the Americans close – or, rather, lumbering them close – are so much fatter than we used to be? Obesity is all about us these days, and since it is all about everything from social and sexual undesirability to premature clogpopping, it may well be that the market for the public announcement of weight has vanished: not only do we not want the rest of the mob in Finchley Road tube station to turn, goggle, and snigger, we fear that the news might reach doctors who will refuse to treat us, insurance companies who will refuse to indemnify us, airlines who will refuse to carry us, employers who will refuse to promote us, and women who will twig that we are holding our stomachs in. Or, if not that, might it be the era’s fashionable correctnesses that have dissuaded manufacturers from staying in business? Voices carry baggage: the old machines talked posh, but these days they would have to talk not merely common, too, but regional and ethnic; they would have to display buttons inviting the weighee to choose Estuary or Scouse or Welsh or Gujurat or Xhosa or Urdu or Yiddish, lest the machine find itself trolleyed off by the Council for Racial Equal
ity and summoned to argue its defence before the European Court in Luxembourg, probably in both French and Walloon, or, at the very least, Esperanto.

  Then there’s violence. Or, rather, now there’s violence: then, railway platforms were safe places, the worst you could get in your eye was a piece of soot which Trevor Howard would effortlessly remove, before buying you a convalescent rock cake. Now what you get in your eye is a fist. If a thug, illiterate, drunk, drugged, all three, poked his coin in something, and, instead of passing him a Mars bar, it told him, in Swahili, that he was 14 stone, he would almost certainly thump it, breaking a knuckle, and in consequence successfully suing the scales, manufacturer, Mars, Connex South Eastern, the Health & Safety Executive, and the headmaster who began all this by giving him a detention for bringing his Kalashnikov to school.

  So there we are. Not much of an opening sentence, it wasn’t Harry Potter & the Weighing Machine, but at least it didn’t take 766 pages, and it may have struck a chord. If only with readers who were ten stone seven, once.

  Gloss Finish

  OH, comfort and joy! And could there be timelier tidings of them? My first yuletide presents are not merely arriving, they are arriving by the bagload! Every morning, at the thrilling clunk of the letter-box, I fly downstairs, and, yes, look, there are another three shimmering on the mat, each even more mouth-wateringly sumptuous than yesterday’s. Christmas gift catalogues.

  Whether you’re a stressed executive, a busy housewife, a boisterous child, a hard-to-please teenager, or just a lively pensioner at a loose end, you can derive both endless pleasure and tension-relieving fun with these fabulously opulent artefacts in which traditional craftsmanship and cutting-edge innovation combine to produce a truly premier product. Each must-have catalogue comes in its own fully transparent envelope, expertly fashioned out of non-biodegradable polymers from more than one country of origin, with your individual personalised name clearly printed on the front in a bold modern user-friendly script, and is professionally designed to be opened with the teeth, or, for those with dentures/wonky bridgework/cold sores, any other handy sharp implement (not supplied). NB: Take care to stand well away from other people or pets when pulling the catalogue out, since an elbow in the eye may offend. Should a child/cat/uncaged bird get its head inside the envelope, pull it off. (The envelope, not the head: if the latter is what you inadvertently do, consult your GP or any reliable vet as soon as possible. Please note that the catalogue-makers are not responsible for any damage or injury arising, including a staple in the thumb/lip/other soft tissue. While every effort is made to secure all sharp components to avoid making holes in you, be advised that staples can go up as well as down.)