Camrastan

The clock struck eleven yet again as Jethro Gill shouldered his way into the British Film Institute. It's now called Old Peculiar's Pelicular Panopticon, he had to remind himself. And it was only nine-thirty on a damp March morning. "A trifle inclement," as the wireless had chuckled in Banter - the new English standard.

It was always eleven o'clock - opening time - since the Great Shiving. Getting used to the lingo was only the half of it. Jethro reached for a cigarette, only to realise he'd left his stash at home. Since the Shiving only pipes and roll-ups were allowed, and a cigar on the wife's birthday. The me'm-sah'b, Her Indoors.

"Briars and rollies - the whole country looks like a Cornish town council," Jethro muttered as he rifled through the in-tray.

He remembered the revolution well. It had all happened so suddenly. The last pub in Henley had put up its shutters in the face of a thirsty party of Thames walkers, just as a Community Patrol officer was telling a joiner outside a Bermondsey bookies to put out his Benson.

The resulting riots spread nationwide. The shires, suburbs and inner cities marched on Westminster, the politicians fled, and the people stood bewildered and triumphant. The triumvirate - Clarkson, Lumley and Vegas - had time only to design a coat of arms for the New Commonwealth (a Jag hub cap, with pitbull rampant and can and ashtray gules, motto "Circum Tuum") before they fell to squabbling.

Then came the "Sallying Forth", as the chap with the plan, the CAMRA Man, launched the Great Shiving. Soup-stained Savonarolas of the Campaign for Real Ale exploited the national binge and endless smoke-ins to seize the gutted shell of the Mansion House and total power.

Tribune Joanna Lumley alone survived as the figurehead of state, wheeled out on Jerome K Jerome Day to smash a cask on the hull of a new naval skiff.

The rest was a nightmare, a nightmare of horror. Jeans were banned unless elastic-waisted, all lager was drained into the Thames, filter tips, trainers and shaving kits were thrown on the bonfire of the vanities in Trafalgar Square.

Within days all the good-looking women had fled to Wales before the punishment battalions of dieticians and flatscreen TV salesmen were forced to raised Offa's Anti-Taff Defence Barrier high into the Marcher sky.

England was no longer England. Now it was Camrastan, a chillingly jocular epithet intended to "win over our Mohammedan charges to the ways of the wort". You couldn't laugh anymore, you had to "chortle", "titter" or "guffaw". Doors didn't open, they were "portals" to be "negotiated". The profiles of Pratchett, Tolkien and Felicity Kendall graced the new Guinea currency.

Even buying a pint of "cooking" was like sitting an extended oral exam for your Masters in Halitosis. "Special" and the maltier brews were reserved for the Old Campaigners - the CAMRAts as the malcontents called them - and the dreaded Porter Police.

Jethro shuddered, and turned to the flickering Amstrad with its fashionable tweed trim. His job was to bring films into line with Campaign teachings. No lager, no grooming and no girlfriends, unless they were chaste and mumsy barmaids.

There were technical teams tasked with etching beards onto Bogart, cutting Grace Kelly's highballs down to halves of shandy, and curling Private Walker's Woodbines into Bent Rhodesians.

Jethro was a writer, and had to recast dialogue to accommodate tepid ale, flannels and cricket in every imaginable plotline, while excising references to non-comic sex. This proved surprisingly easy with most British films, and hardly needed doing to anything before 1954, but Jethro took grudging pride in his adaptations of the French New Wave and Italian Neorealists.

"Les Quatre Cents Coups" became a teenage seaside musical, and "La Dolce Vita" followed a Brummie motorcycle rep as he persuaded Romans to dress warmly and appreciate the superior horsepower of the Triumph Bonneville.

But Jethro knew his time was up. There, at the top of the pile, was his treatment of "Ice Cold in Alex". He had agonised over it for days, but could find no way of persuading even the most anoraked frothblower that the Desert Rats would have yomped through Libya, eschewing all that Afrika Korps beaded Pilsener, for the promise of a cloudy tankard of Champion's Speckled Johnson.

With a reflective "Fuck this", Jethro rolled up his radical reworking of the John Mills classic as "Warm and Soapy in Suez", a 70s sex romp, jammed it in the pneumatique and stomped off down The Tethered Goat.

The Goat looked like any Camrastan ale house. Walls as jaundiced and uneven as the landlord's teeth, faintly amusing notices to the toilets, a bar pocked with men in broken spectacles peering through the murk of their pintpots at some point below the barmaid's chin, and an aroma of dog and slipper tainting the Burley fug.

Jethro nodded to the barmaid. "Pint of Johnson?" she asked. "The Abdication Special," he wheezed. "I'll need to check the cellar." She left the bar and unlocked a door tucked away behind a screen. Returning a moment later, she said "It's off". Jethro nodded and, while no one was watching, slipped through the unlocked door.

He rapped out the "Satisfaction" riff on a mildly disturbing amateur portrait of June Whitfield. The eyes came alive, and a bloodshot glance took him in. "Grolsch!" Jethro hissed. The portrait slid aside, and he stepped into The Fist and Fury - Soho's most notorious lagerama.

Glass, smoked chrome, prawn-homage crisps and every variety of lager, from premium to pig, came at him from all corners. He lit a proffered Lambert & Butler, necked a Budvar and drank in the scene.

In the corner was an illegal feed of Scottish MTV full of Shakiras for the youngsters. The only drawback was poor soundproofing, which meant the jukebox was silent. But at least he could watch the vids - Clash, Stones, Jam, Oasis and Idol. And all the birds were still slags.

Then a Boadicean prow crested the waves of crop tops and cock jokes. Beach bleached hair framed 70s blue eyeliner, Caligula lips and an embonpoint you could eat your breakfast off.

"I call them my Full English," she breathed, "And you just drank my beer". She opened another bottle on her navel. "Want to try that again?"

===================================================================

Jethro and Marianne awoke on a bed of crisps. "Oh Jethro, I thought I was a lesbian until I met you!"

"No doubt," he grunted, dragging himself across to her record collection. Disappointment. It was all CAMRA approved bumptious hilarity - skiffle, Flanders and Swann, Your 100 Best Tunes, Macc Lads. Then he tugged out the vinyl itself - Cockney Rebel, the Kinks. He nearly wept.

"What did you do before They took over," Jethro asked, balancing his head on her breasts.

"I ran my own boutique," she sighed, drawing deep on her Silk Cut. "South American fabrics, Mayan calendars, panpipes, bowler hats, that sort of thing. Then the Board of Trade came round and restocked us with pre-frayed cardigans, Goblin Teasmades, meerschaum pipes and pomade. I kept the bowler hats, but sold up once they ran out."

Jethro mused that CAMRA wasn't wrong all the time.

"I've been sort of drifting since then," she continued unbidden. "I do some black market highlighting, the Belfast lingerie run. How about you?"

"I've just burned my bridges," he began. "Proposed turning a grim Brit war film into a saucy romp. Well, it did have Liz Fraser in it."

"That was 'Desert Mice'," Marianne added. "You mean Sylvia Syms."

Jethro felt clammy. He tried to sit up, but the breasts held him fast. "How did you know I was working on 'Ice Cold in Alex'?"

Marianne paused, then released him. "Don't worry, they just want a word, that's all."

The bathroom door creaked open, and in ambled a Porter Police patrol in crumpled corduroy. "A beard in your earhole, old chap," grinned the commander.

Jethro stared at Marianne. "I'm sorry," she sobbed. "But they had Baileys."

The Jeremy Clarkson Book of Happy Endings

Unlike Wales, plain women and his BBC paymasters, I like Jeremy Clarkson. The obsession with motor cars and himself does not move me, but I enjoy his unmasking of lettuce and willingness to wander around in public looking like Jeremy Clarkson. His facial tributes to John Carpenter's The Thing (mid-transformation) never cease to please.

News that he had taken his first wife as a mistress - a lady who must be an echoing cavern of self-loathing - ushers him into the Alan Clark Waiting-Room of Caddish Eminence. The time has come to drop the sports jacket and jeans for a gap between the front teeth, trim 'tache, cravat, blazer and personal tankard behind the bar of a country pub near Maidenhead - where they call him "Major" and keep a room upstairs in case the Jaaaaaaaaaaag breaks down and he needs to comfort his secretary.

Jeremy also puts me in mind of a niche Christmas gift market for unpopular men that has not yet been skewered by the axis of socks and cologne. I call it "The Jeremy Clarkson Book of Happy Endings".

The target buyer is a recently-divorced woman. She has the house and most of the money, but there's one thing she can't take from the noisome octopus to whom she was lately wed - his puerility. And divorce gives him the chance to rediscover it.

He's already kitting out his batchelor hutch with all the apparel of midlife adolescence:

• a water sofa-bed
• a fridge with easily-distinguishable bacon and lager sections
• a PC with patent "Plasterer's Radio" self-degumming monitor
• a compact recording studio, still in its box, and, above all,
• a giant flatscreen HD television on which to wallow in the films of yesteryear.

What he least expects is such an apparently-thoughtful gift as "The Jeremy Clarkson Book of Happy Endings" from his ex-wife. This bangs all the right gongs:

• It look like a Ladybird book, evoking teary memories of childish thumbing through the "Kings & Queens of England" in search of good beheadings
• It is endorsed by Jeremy, which guarantees wit as dry as a Martian Martini, and
• "Happy Endings" reminds him of something that happened to Mike on a golfing holiday in Bangkok, which would have been alright if the girl in question hadn't turned out to have been a chap.

Plus the fact it's a book means that, alongside his car manual and bound volumes of Viz, he now has a library.

And so he settles down in the director's chair with his feet up on the boxed set of Japanese import "Wacky Races" DVDs and opens "Clarkson". On the right-hand page he sees a picture of a Turkish gangster shooting up a seraglio. Excellent. On the left he reads the following text:

Kevin Spacey is Keyser Söze in "The Usual Suspects".

The nightmare begins. The picture lured him in, then the words delivered the coup de grace. Before he can cover his eyes, the film is ruined. But he cannot stop. Jeremy beckons. In misery he turns the page. A sweaty man in a baseball cap stares at him.

Soylent Green is people!

He blinks back the tears as his fingers flick across to the wheaten features of a brown-suited child, receding down a Georgetown sidestreet.

The psychiatrist is dead. Obvious since the scene with his wife in the church, when you think about it.

On he goes, through the wreckage of his film archive. Merry is the widow, for she has understood and overcome a fundamental male survival technique.

Men have no long-term memory. That's why we compile lists - not only because we believe in wasting time better spent shoe-shopping or listening to women, but because otherwise we'd forgot your names and where the kids' schools are.

This is a true blessing, and proof of the existence of a genial and thoroughly clubbable God. It means that we rarely reflect upon the essential shallowness of our own existence, have no problems with enjoying football and will, after a shandy, chat up your sister at a christening once again.

It also explains why we watch the same films over and over. I for one can never remember that Stapleton's sister is in fact his wife, despite the mundanity of such arrangements back in Wales, and therefore approach each reading/viewing of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" with a lamb-like skip.

Women, on the other hand, need to know. This is why they read the last page of a book first, to assure themselves that it is worth reading. This is also why they ask what men are thinking all the time. Men, like my near namesake in "Under Milk Wood", are either thinking of wet corsets or nothing.

And so the divorcé looks forward to evening after curry-stoked evening in his celluloid back catalogue, with the flicker of the cathode reflecting his rapt gaze of amazement as the Mafia and entire US Government kill JFK from all possible angles, some gunman takes out Carter on a charcoal Geordie beach, and the Christian copper dies at the setting of the pagan Summerisle Sun.

"The Clarkson Book of Happy Endings" is the ex-wife's silent revenge, for her former spouse can't stop reading on despite the horrors it holds. Men are all addicts, and if it's bad for them they just can't stop. His meagre interior life dissolves in each acid page, but forward he goes like Scott of the Unconscious, snivelling "Why Jeremy, Why?", until the last page.

There Edgar Allan Poe meets his red-rimmed stare, holding a rubber mask in his ivory hands.

And you would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.

It's "The King in Yellow" for this post-decadent century. Buy it now ladies, and our world is yours.

"Pa vo beuzet Paris, Ec'h adsavo Ker Is."

damnatio ad bestias

The BBC's looking for new programme ideas again. They've yet to accept any of my previous offerings, so I've modelled this bid on something they already like and given it a modish political angle.

Along the lines of BBC3's worthy "Snog, Marry, Avoid", I'd like to propose "Shelter, Shag, Shunt".

Exclusively nubile asylum seekers are assessed by a panel of sandpapery newspaper columnists, loathesome hipsters and Radio 4 official comedians to decide whether to:

• house them for free in the attic of the North London mews you share with your dreary Quaker-lite family;
  


• employ them as, er, nannies;
  


• or/and denounce them to Immigration.
  

nominations for panelists below, please.

If the Beeb's not interested I may try Sky, or the Home Office.

Die Verwandlung

Victor Carroon, the British astronaut in the Quatermass Experiment, endured his painful transformation into a malign extraterrestrial carpet with silent, stoic anguish. I am bearing my steady evolution into my own father with less dignity.

Readers of this web blog will know that I've long lamented the failure of the Antient Order of the Dad to lead me along the Path of the Hush Puppy. It looks like this impertinence has earned me an Ovidian punishment.

In my bachelor days I used to spend a few weeks at my parents' house each summer while they tramped around Bavaria in search of the Spear of Destiny. One year my father had abandoned his opposition to the video recorder ("Satan's trouser-press!" was his initial judgment) and filled a bookshelf with tapes for me to plunder.

To my New Statesmanly chagrin his video collection (pronounced "vie-deo" in Wales, by the way) consisted entirely of grim Brit war flicks like "Ice-Cold in Alex" and a couple of staid thrillers. After a comprehensive audit I found two films worth watching - "The Day of the Jackal" and another copy of the same.

I'd brought a worn tape of "Betty Blue" with me in lieu of human female company, otherwise I was at the mercy of Houseburner's Choice on the S4C Welsh channel. There was nothing for it but to go out and get bat-punching drunk down the Llawes Goch tavern every night and challenge the town's leading Gypsy artist to smoking competitions. Country ways.

Now, however, my dvd rental list is choked with offerings from Dirk Bogarde's khaki hetero phase and "Tora! Tora!Tora!", which I realised is not about exuberant Hasidim. There's certainly more Frederick than Bill in my Forsyth selection.

I shall pass over the Venn intersection with my father on politics and clothing with little comment. It is as much a question of age and affluence as of genes. Yes, both Lord Tebbit and Mr Netanyahu make a lot more sense to me now than they did in the 1980s, and my IRA funeral party chic has long been decommissioned in favour of sludgy tweeds and a tendency for my head to keep growing through the top of my hair.

Of more concern are major divergences from my previous philosophical theses on weighty matters. Film choices are one. Motor vehicles are another.

Keen Boyovians will recall the touching combination of reluctance and incompetence with which I approached learning to drive, while Mrs Boyo's cadres may prefer her more dialectical accounts.

Once I'd wrenched the certificate from the cold, hairless palm of the driving examiner, I swore to Mrs Boyo that our car would do no more than ferry her good self to that airstrip where she meets her Colombian chums near Dunwich and take our daughter Arianrhod on trips to the vet.

A few weeks passed and I'd become a sparking plug of chauvinist velocity, my right arm lobstered large from cabbie's elbow, my flecked eyes set on sneer alert for any signs of non-reverse parking or adherence to rural speed limits:

• I have to be lured from the driving seat by offers of raw steak, rum and an evening's viewing of the Top Gear three-part special on Wankel engines;
  
  
• On my frequent exiles from the Boyo bedroom I find solace in running my sac up and down the fan belt, which is warmer and more legal than hanging around that nurses' training college in the early hours; and
  
  
• Mention the word "escort" and once I'd have obliged with my little black book of big black ladies. Now I whimper "The Mark III - why, Ford, why?!"
  

More precious pillars of my persona may now be bracing themselves for the blows of banality.

My taste in music is so exquisite that previous lady friends have cited it as unreasonable behaviour. So when will I buy my first brass band medley or compilation of "hits"? And is that Mireille Mathieu luring me onto the rocks - in German?

As Gyppo Byard has gallantly recalled, I like my ladies the way I like my lemons - bitter, jaundiced and unwaxed. So what signs of decay can I next expect? I think of my father's film collection, and the words "Joan Greenwood" toll like a leper's bell in my inner ear. A yearning for Felicity Kendal will mean I've got off lightly.

Like Dorian Gray, I peer queerly at the picture that hangs in my study. A pipe has appeared in the breast pocket, true, but is that a ballpoint pen that now nestles beside it? Has the hour struck when, like Zhatko before me, I murmur "mon semblable - mon père"?

Heimatklang

Wales beckons with its six-fingered shuffle, and so the House of Boyo is piling into Old Mossy tomorrow morning for a week of drizzle, feral relatives and nursery food in the ancestral shed in Snowdonia.

Leaves in the dam often leave our hometown with an erratic power supply, as do angry peasants advancing up the hill at midnight, so web blogging may be light. In which case I leave you with the further adventures of Capt Deakin in or near Afghanistan.

As they say in Penarth, ciao for now:

DOWN THE OXUS ON A LOG: PART THE THIRD

The Governor motioned on his map to the blasted deserts north of the Hindoo-Koosh, that God-forsaken arena for the Tournament of Shadows between England and the Russian Bear for the fealty of the petty Amirs and Khans of Toorkistan.

"Things arebeginning to stir up there on the Oxus, Deakin, and it's time for us to strengthen our hand amongst the Pamiri chieftains. We have had reports, disturbing reports, that Cossack patrols from Tashkent are plying the hill-tribes of Wakhan and Kulyab with baubles, jewelled prayer-books and Smith & Wesson repeat-action rifles, not to mention Persian dancing-boys.

"The most worrying intelligence is that Col. Shatkovski is amongst them - no, you buffoon, not the dancing-boys, although Iwouldn't put that past him. He is a master of disguise, seduction, and all the other dark arts of espionage. Fluent inall the local Turki dialects, plus Persian, Pashto and English, he is a most formidable adversary - his greatest weapon being the insight into our own way of thinking he gained from attending a minor public school in Scotland; Dr Shuggie Macleod's Caledonian Academy, I believe.

"There he learnt to survive on salted grits, clad only in a hessian kilt, in extreme cold and almost Trappist silence for his first eighteen years. Part of some absurd exchange programme, it seems, under which we sent twenty pale youths to the Russiacity of Voronezh, a ship-building centre near the Don. They all returned married to Cossack women, and had to be put out of their misery within weeks."

"So you want an expedition to go up there and flog the blazes out of the Pamiris' womenfolk, to show the infidel who's boss of the Himalayas from Assam to Bokhara, eh Sir?" I interrupted enthusiastically. "Problem solved. I'll assemble a raiding party from the Gallant Welshmen of the Fifth, under Lt. Probert, right away, Sir, and show those heathens what fun can be had with three lengths of stout hemp and a selection of melons. Leave it to Deakin, Sir!"

The Governor was silent for a while, moved no doubt by my selfless offer to sacrifice my own men in the glaciers ofthe north. He even had to sit down and hold his head in his hands for a good few minutes, before raising his bloodshot eyes and addressing me again.

"Captain. Shut up and listen to me, or I'll second you to the Army Education Corps. How do you fancy twenty years of teaching literacy and elementary toilet-training to web-fingered East Anglians who pine for the sisters in the Fens? I thought not. Right, this is what you are going to do.

"I have gathered a small party of pundits - natives who know the uncharted Hindoo-Koosh passes and the Pamiri statelets like the back of their hands, and who can pass through the bazaars of Samarkand and Bokhara unnoticed. They are loyal and discreet, and will lead a select group of officers to the Hakim of Bunjikath, who we believe is willing to cut off the Cossacks as they return north from their mission to the Akhund of Basiq-Arvil.

"The Hakim has no love for the Russians, but has as yet no reason to help us either. The aim of our party will be to overtake Shatkovski and his mercenary crew, assure the Hakim of His Majesty's intentions to protect the Pamiris from the Bear's incursions, and promise him all the territories of Basiq-Arvil from the frontier with Kondooz to the Bokharan settlement of Hissar..."

At this point the oppressive heat, compounded by the delayed effects of the previous night's gin-drinking competition with"Fluffy" Tarry in the Mess - I won - conspired to send me into a light doze, but I don't think the Governor noticed.

"Wake up, you slobbering dipsomaniac! Good Lord, I have no more time to waste on you. Listen. You will nominally head the party, because the Russians have never heard of your worthless hide, and because you have the ideal alibi - officially you're dead. If reports of you reach the Russians, they will simply attribute them to native idiocy - moreover, they will never believe that we would entrust such a sensitive mission to a shifty incompetent like you.

"And they will be right. The party will in practice be led by two fine soldiers: Captain Champion of the Kashmiri Rifles, a superb linguist, crack shot and gallant officer, who has led many forays against the Pathans; and by Abdul Khalik, a pundit who is known and respected bythe Hakim of Bunjikath.

"Both men are too well-known to be formally acknowledged as members of the party, and will travel in mufti as traders: Champion has passed himself off as an Uighur merchant from Kashgar several times before. Your task will be to render them any assistance they might need - in short, to be expendable.

"If the mission succeeds and the Hakim pledges allegiance to the King-Emperor, we will have halted the Russian juggernaut in its tracks - St Petersburg will not dare openly challenge England, its ally in Europe, for control of the passes to Afghanistan. Moreover, you will have won yourself redemption, and will be allowed to return to the card-tables of Quetta to fritter away your life in vulgar debauchery."

"Thank you sir, there is nothing I could wish for more. You can count on me. But may I ask one question?", I interposed. The Governor nodded his assent. "The way I see it is this. The alliance with Russia is all wrong. Look, Ivan may becoming over all soft in Europe, but the battle for world domination is being played out here, in the Afghan Cockpit. The Germans have no objection, as I see it, to our dominion over Asia, as long as we let them establish beach-towel hegemony over the Frogs and Wops. If we let them have their way across the Channel, they will have no reason not to help us give the Russkies the damn good hidin' they deserve on the Oxus and Jaxartes.

"Siberia will then be ours, an ideal dumping ground for all the socialists, liberals, Jews and book-reading types as are ruinin' our country. Our joint Germanic axis can then turn its attention to winning back the North American colonies and bringing civilisation to the benighted Africans and Latin Americans. European history took a wrong turning when it abandoned feudalism, and it's up to us Saxons to put matters right by sharing the benefits of slavery, corporal punishment and extensive ground-nut plantations with the lesser breeds.

"Champion and I shall take big guns, plenty of whisky and some Lilly Langtree phonogram recordings to the Hakim fellow, let him keep this Abdulawallah chap as a gesture of goodwill, then move the Baluchi Lancers up to the Pamirs, cable the Kaiser and tell him to get his Hussars cracking against Ivan. Yer see, the Krauts have this Von Schlieffen Plan, and it really can't fail, because..."

"Captain Deakin!", shrieked the Governor. "You will keep your political fantasies to yourself or I'll have you shot for treason! Do as Capt. Champion says, keep your tackle in your trousers, maintain some semblance of sobriety and maybe -just maybe - I'll let you return to your regiment. Is that clear? Good.

"Now, report to the Kashmiri Rifles at four o'clock sharp tomorrow morning. Champion and Abdul Khalik will be waiting for you, and you can set off before morning prayers. Get your batman to assemble mountain kit for you tonight, retire early, and don't let me hear from you again until you return with your party intact and the Hakim's pledge of loyalty in your pocket. Now go!"

"So you agree to my plan, Sir!" I exclaimed in delight. The Governor clasped his head in his hands once again, no doubt overwhelmed by my brilliant strategic vision and the honour History would accord him for his role as my mentor in this undertaking.

"Listen, Peter," he said quietly. "You go and have an early night, and report to the Kashmiris as I said. Send my your batman, and I'll explain everything to him, alright?"

"Jawohl, Herr Gouverneur!" I assented with a knowing click of my heels, and moved to leave the State Room.

"One moment, Deakin," he beckoned. "Just tell me this before you go: how did you ever obtain a commission in the first place?"

"Perfectly simple, Sir; I inherited if orf my brother Bill."

"Bill, Bill Deakin? You surely don't mean William Wilberforce D'Arcy Deakin, the most brilliant graduate from Sandhurst in his year? Really? My son was there, too. Says your brother was a most promising officer."

"Oh, yes, Bill. Bit of an off-ox, actually. Wouldn't let Pater buy him a commission. Insisted on going through Sandhurst on merit, and then volunteered for the Engineers, fer Chrissakes. Wasted his spare time writing some damn-fool book- "The Army of the Future" or something, about how cavalry and infantry must be replaced by high-mobility mechanised divisions, or else the next war will be bogged down in murderous trench-warfare that will sacrifice an entire generation of the Flower of Europe, one by one. Well, I ask you! Thought bright-red uniforms were a bad idea, too. Stuff and nonsense!"

"What happened to him?" asked the Governor.

"Well, he decided to get himself married. Not to a decent shires brood-mare, either, but to some Oxford blue-stocking. Went on their honeymoon to look at wall-paintings in churches in Italy, if yer please. Wouldn't have a stag-night in the mess either, - her idea, no doubt - so me and the chaps slipped some stiff ones in his cocoa the night before and left him with a tupp'ny whore in Whitechapel - old Uncle Jack's stamping-ground, yer know. The least we could do.

"Anyway, damnedest thing happened. He came back from Eytieland blind, started raving about being the Duke of Wellington, went paralysed from the neck down, lost his nose, and died. Bit of a nancy-boy, really, but a shame all the same. Mater was quite cut-up about it, actually; too grief-stricken to speak to me for five years.

"Anyway, our loss was the Army's gain. Pater pulled a few strings and I got the commission."

The Governor was silent for a while. "You mean your father paid good money to get you into the Fifth Baluchi Lancers?"

"Well, er, no, actually. I was meant to join the Welsh Guards- fifteen guineas and a season-ticket to Twickenham for the CO, apparently - but my attempts to console Bill's widow were horribly misinterpreted, and the Lancers was where I ended up. Still, they're a good bunch and they do a damn important job."

"Yes, I suppose the Empire needs men to keep those vicious Baluchi nomad-pastoralists under control, or else they might sack Delhi with their dreaded, sharp-fanged flocks of sheep and fearsome walking-sticks."

"Quite, Sir. Their womenfolk are a force to be reckoned with, too," I agreed ruefully, recalling the number of narrow escapes we'd had from their wet towels and heavy undergarments during our Washing-Day bayonet-charges on the village bath-houses.

"Off you go, Deakin, and don't come back until I've been transferred somewhere else," said the Governor with a straight face. Quite a wag, really, I thought.