In Good Company: Butter Mountains - And Coal
Prices were a whole lot cheaper - even at £50 a head - than they are today in the decade when Enid Blackburn wrote this column.
What an amazing society we live in! At a christening a baby nestling in his proud mother’s arms – had six Godfathers. ‘Anyone of the six might have been the father,’ explained a guest. ‘The family came to this really aristocratic solution.’ Each Godfather provided a Christian name and mummy, daughter of a Peer, gave her maiden name as surname.
I feel sure baby will find it spiffing fun receiving his six presents every year and writing ‘with love to daddy,’ six times in return – right until he is old enough to understand what it means in fact.
Meanwhile at the Tate Gallery three security guards sit in solemn well-paid silence – watching over three piles of coal. These coal heaps reminiscent of the mess my coal man used to leave in my back yard if I didn’t watch him, are the creation of the late Marcel Broodhaer, an artist, not a coal merchant, I hasten to inform. His work is the subject of the Tate’s latest exhibition. One can only contemplate the cost of this security exercise and pray it is justified.
Of course I am merely an ignorant tax payer who has yet to discover any artistic significance in a pile of coal, and can’t visualise anyone – anyone with a gas fire anyway – running off with a sack of it, much less getting away with it. Wouldn’t a hundred weight of coal be difficult to disguise?
Even if one is a coal freak, where does one display these objets d’art? Too big for the sideboard and who but a short-sighted coal man would dump them on the front lawn?
Now here’s one for the cricket lovers. Fancy a day out with a difference? Over to Trent Bridge for the opening day of the forthcoming Test Match against the West Indies. ‘Why not give your favourite customers their most memorable day out’ is the invitation from a sports firm. Take them to Trent Bridge, give them a sherry reception, a champagne buffet luncheon, afternoon tea, all while watching play from the exclusive licensed restaurant, everything taken care of by the firm.
All you have to do is find £50 a head per day. Plus VAT naturally.
Then back at the supermarket we have shoppers protesting over the latest price increases. Wholesale prices are their highest level since 1977. Mean-while cheap butter is being shipped to Russia and French farmers have burned an effigy of Margaret Thatcher in protest of her blocking an EEC agricultural subsidy. Confusing isn’t it?
As if this is not enough to contend with I have just discovered what the world in general thinks about we ‘smallies.’ According to Ralph Keyes author of ‘The Height of Your Life,’ tall is all and bigger is better. By the age of 30 we have all shrunk an inch, so when I am 60 I should make an eligible mate for the little guy in ‘Fantasy Island.’
Mr Keyes also points out that there are no short Miss Worlds. Why not, I would like to know. Why should this height discrimination exist?
Tall girls may be elegant, willowy and graceful. But we shorties are cute, cuddly and easier to carry.
Anyway, if as he says, Ingrid Bergman had to shuffle along a specially dug trench when filming with the shorter Humphrey Bogart and Sophia Loren had to stand Alan Ladd on a crate before she could kiss him – being tall is not much fun either!
Now you can chat among yourselves for a week while I dash off to the Isle of Wight.
