Bankrupt Tin-Hitlers

Ah! Memories, memories! Some years ago I had to speak to one of those manual-reading humanoid-robots in a banking call centre and it just could not take my point (although exactly what it was I forget - but I was definitely in the right). This was all a long time before the British banks went bankrupt (what pleasure there is to be found in making that observation). I recall that the robot had a thick accent - but whether it was strong, North of England "Eee-up"; Narthern Oirish, or Popadum-Asian, I don't recall. I just know that it did not help. And, I, the customer, felt short-changed by some stroppy, patronizing and obstructive smart-alec, who was probably borderline illiterate.

So, I said to the robot: "You're a t**d".

There was  a stunned silence at the other end; there being, plainly, no 'manual' response to this one. Then the robot spluttered (and I mean spluttered); well, actually it was between a splutter and a squeak:

"What did you say?"

So I refreshed his memory: "You're a t**d" I said and, pausing just long enough to hear the second round of stunned silence, I hung up, leaving him short on the old 'job satisfaction' front. Of course, by this stage, I had concluded two things. First, that, without a lot of fuss and effort (a letter of complaint and, maybe, even a reference to the toothless Ombudsman), I was not going to get a satisfactory resolution and, secondly, that it was time to change my bank.

I strongly recommend this course of action when nasty little officials go too far. It doesn't achieve any practical result but, by jingo and by jove, it makes you feel much better.

The Road More Travelled

As a poor student I can remember pressing my cold nose against the windows of shops such as W S Foster and Floris in Jermyn Street and now I understand that they have some of my books for sale. And that's not all: Floris tell me that Brummell's ghost pops in from time to time and he was seen actually reading one of them at the counter. Apparently, he was smiling as he was reading but the devil of it is that I shall never know whether he was smiling in approbation or derision; still Brummell's ghost was reading my book in Floris: that's a long way down the road from just having a cold nose pressed, Little Match Girl-like, against a plate glass window of another of the world's most beautiful shops.

Speaking of things olfactory: gentle readers might keep their eyes open for a feature in The Field magazine entitled How Not To Smell Like a Dank Dog by someone from around here. I think that it's in the next edition. Thanks to John Bodenham of Floris, it even includes some nice pictures from their archive.

Some Still Like It Hot at Mr Lobb of St James's Street

After all the fame and the fortunate years, starring in Coward musicals, the musical stage actress, Ivy St Helier, fell on hard times and, according to Brian Dobbs' fine book, about John Lobb: "The Last Shall Be First" [Elm Tree Books, 1972], she visited Mr Lobb in St James's Street for a new pair of shoes. But, before I get to what happened then, I pause just to mention that the book's title is Lobb's motto and is derived, in a very Victorian way, from a few references in the New Testament. In fact it is a double pun because not only does the shoe last come first in the shoe-making process but John Lobb, as an upstart, intended from the very beginning, to be at the head of his trade: 'the first'; whether or not they make the very best bespoke shoes (actually, I'd say that Foster-Henry Maxwell make better), the whole world has heard of 'John Lobb shoes' as very fine shoes: hence the double pun.

Anyway back to my abandoned sheep, grazing nonchalantly on the hillside, and Ivy St Helier. On entering the shop, she encountered a Lobb employee who asked how he could help and Ivy St Helier said that she wanted to order a new pair of shoes but that she could afford only £so-and-so. The employee then went up the stairs to Eric Lobb's office, off the gallery, and explained that there was a lady downstairs who wanted new shoes but could not afford the full price. Eric Lobb told the employee to tell her that the shop was not an eastern bazar and there could be no haggling. The shopman went back down and relayed the message but Ivy St Helier persisted and the shopman returned to Eric Lobb who asked the shopman for her name. The shopman then found out that she was called Ivy St Helier and told Eric Lobb, who remembered seeing her playing Manon in Cowards' original, 1929 production of Bitter-Sweet and so he smiled and told the shopman to go down and say to her Hey-ho! If Love Were All, from the title of one of her songs from the show.

So the shopman trundled back down the stairs and delivered the line, before rushing back up to Eric Lobb, panting: "You've done it now, sir, you'll have to come down - she's burst into tears."

Eric Lobb then went down to the shop and greeted Ivy St Helier, telling her how much he had enjoyed her performances and what an honour it was to have her back in the shop, and then he told her to choose any shoe style she liked to be made with his compliments.

It is not then only because of its fine structure that John Lobb's deserves Esquire magazine's description as "possibly the most beautiful shop in the world".

As Ivy St Helier was leaving, she turned and said that today 'cool' is the thing but that, when she was young, they had "liked it hot."

Here is a short clip of a recording of the song sung by Ivy St Helier:

http://us.dada.net/music/ivysthelierwithorchestra/if-love-were-all-(1999-digital-remaster)_1381770m.html

The Right To Get Fat

There are finger-wagging Tin-Hitlers out there, lecturing us about the dangers of alcohol, smoking, coffee, sugar and now they're onto the hobby-horse of fatty foods. One trouble with the scientists on whom they rely, and whose opinions are central to a lot of  government thinking on these subjects, is that they seem to blow with the wind: one week, a couple of glasses of red wine a day are good for you and, more or less the very next week, ever having drunk any alcohol at all leaves you with a heightened risk of developing cancer. One week, coffee is a clot-busting miracle drug and the next it is the stuff of which heart attacks are made - and so it goes on. And on. And on. And on.

Apparently, the Danish have dreamed up a super-tax aimed at fat people. The idea is to tax them on fatty foods; not to raise revenue as such, but to lessen expenditure, because it is aimed at deterring people from needing medical treatment as a result of indulging in fatty foods (the only up-side is that Ronald MacDonald might hit the skids).

The ban on smoking nearly everywhere has almost certainly left the governments without a great big wedge of revenue from tobacco taxes. Hence the state-funded health services are going to suffer. They can no longer financially cope with treating fat people, who need stronger beds and more food than thin people. So they have come up with the perfectly brilliant idea of taxing them and if not out of existence at least taxing them down to size. The eugenicists of the early twentieth century would have been right behind all this political nonsense, because it is also, in part, about creating 'perfect' human specimens and controlling what they consume and even how they think.

There's a book kicking around about how the world would have been had Hitler and the Axis forces won WWII. Their genocidal tendencies aside, I really do wonder whether Hitler and Mussolini would actually have laid so many personal freedoms so low, as the modern 'great western democracies' have done. There was even a recent news item that children had been taken away from their parents and put into local authority 'care' because their parents were over-feeding them!

And the really shocking thing is that no one much seems to notice; let alone care. Maybe it is time to take note of a few words of wisdom from Tacitus: 'summum ius summa iniuria': [more laws, more injustice].

That's a warning that should be heeded before it's too late. And it nearly is too late.

Today's picture is of Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle being fed a face-full of fatty acids by Mabel Normand.

Dotty Parker: "Excuse my dust"

The great wit Dorothy Parker gave herself two epitaphs: "Excuse my dust" and "This one's on me".

There's an interesting little tale about Dorothy Parker's dust. She was cremated on 9th June 1967 in Hartsdale but her friend Lilian Hellman (maybe because she was upset that Dotty had left her estate to Dr Martin Luther King and not to her), left the ashes at the crematorium and for six years they sat there on a shelf. The crematorium then sent the ashes to Dotty's lawyer's offices, where they remained in a filing cabinet for fifteen years. Someone then remembered them again and they were given to the charity which (on the death of King), became her principal beneficiary and they interred them, on 20th October 1988, in a dedicated memorial garden, under a plaque which actually mentions "Excuse my dust".

My favourite Dotty story concerns a neighbour who visited her just after her second husband died of a drug overdose. The neighbour asked whether there was anything she could do and Dorothy Parker replied "Get me a new husband". The neighbour told Dorothy Parker that this was the most shocking thing that she had ever heard and Dorothy Parker then said:

"Well, then, run down to the corner and get me a ham and cheese on rye - but tell them to hold the mayonnaise."

Reference Books Online and Bells on Sunday

Just to spread the word that membership of a public library in England (maybe other parts of the UK too) entitles the member to online access to a whole range of excellent works of reference, including the full Oxford English Dictionary; just visit your local library website and search. Have your card number to hand because this enables you to log-on to read the books.

One of the thing that I miss about Blighty is peals of church bells; often twice a week, a practice session and then the Sunday peals, as well as wedding bells and the passing bell. However, BBC Radio 4 broadcasts a peal or two each Sunday in a little programme called Bells on Sunday and I have just had my weekly fix, by virtue of the listen again facility, which also brings us The Archers' omnibus. St Clement Danes' church in Strand, London ('oranges and lemons'):

In Milady's Boudoir

As I acknowledge in History of Men's Fashion (not a title that I ever wanted), the sub-title What The Well Dressed Man Is Wearing derives from P G Wodehouse's Right-ho! Jeeves, in which Bertie Wooster is prevailed upon by his Aunt Dahlia to write an article for her failing magazine Milady's Boudoir. What I did not know until today is that this is a humorous jibe at the magazine The Lady which, in fact, had declined a Wodehouse story.

The fact that I chose this as a sub-title might have been a clue to the fact that the book was written in a spirit of fun but, instead, legion 'i-gents' (i.e. those concerned with exchanging views over the internet on the minutiae of men's dress and early twentieth century etiquette [that word makes me shudder]), have been at pains to criticize the substance as though it were not written tongue firmly in cheek. This is not to say that I did not strive for reasonable accuracy and a promised second edition will iron out the creases (so to speak) but I sometimes wonder what happened to the British sense of humour.

Today's picture is of the current proprietress of The Lady, Mrs Julia Budworth. The magazine has been in family ownership since it was founded by Thomas Gibson-Bowles in the late nineteenth century (along with the original Vanity Fair magazine). Apparently, Boris Johnson's sister Rachel has been taken onboard to introduce "hip in place of hip-replacement" in a revamping of this magazine ("Butler wanted"), so often found in dentists' and doctors' waiting rooms.

'Debo' Mitford is JB's cousin and appears on the copy of the magazine that she is holding.