Quality | 2009.05.23
Open the gate: scandal needs a name | Simon Hoggart
What this expenses scandal needs is a nifty title. The Case of the Phantom Mortgage has a nice Sheridan Le Fanu ring to it, though on the long side. Somewhere in the data there must be a bill for a rustic hearth in a former partner\'s home repaired at the taxpayers\' expense: that would give us Late Mate\'s Slate Grategate.
Meanwhile, several MPs are grumbling about journalists\' expenses. I can see their point. It must be galling. On the other hand, I should say that the sums we charge are pitiful by comparison – no second homes, no gardening, no tampons. It\'s not public money. And unsurprisingly, many MPs are perfectly happy to be taken out on our expense accounts. Years ago, I was taking a cabinet minister to lunch and asked his secretary if he had a favourite restaurant. "Oh," she said airily, as if discussing the rival merits of Pizza Express and Ask, "he likes the usual places – you know, Le Gavroche, Petrus, Gordon Ramsay …"
• I "emceed" a website the other day – there\'s something you wouldn\'t have read 10 years ago. It was for votematch.co.uk , which cunningly offers you 30 questions related to the next election – in this case for the European parliament. It then tells you which party reflects your views. (Of course, unless you\'re madly pro-European or rabidly anti, you\'re likely to swerve between Ukip and the Lib Dems). The launch was in the trendy Apple Shop in Regent Street, London, and the guest speaker was Stephen Fry, a celebrated techie. He said: "Whenever I am here, I think I have died and gone to heaven. But then I go to Lord\'s, and think I have died and gone to heaven …"
He does an awful lot. I found myself adapting an old joke: what is the difference between Stephen Fry and God? God is everywhere except in the hearts of the unrighteous, whereas Stephen Fry is just everywhere.
• We\'re told that 49 pubs are closing each week in the UK, and that is sad, even if many of them are old, dark, miserable stews where the smoking ban has only enhanced the smell of disinfectant. I\'d guess the way to rescue pubs is for them to go for a niche market, whether good food, unusual ales or just hobbies. I was in Lincoln this week to give a talk at the book festival, and went to the Dog and Bone. It\'s a small pub in the winding streets under the floodlit majesty of that incredible cathedral.
Inside, it\'s warm and cosy. It\'s also the only book-lined pub I\'ve seen. They have a deal: if you bring in a book, you can take any one from the hundreds around the walls. Keep it if you like it, or swap it for another. It\'s a fine, prospering pub, answering three universal human needs: like-minded company, alcohol and something to read.
• You\'ve probably not been following the separation of the "glamour model" Katie Price ("Jordan") and Peter Andre, her husband, though it\'s a huge story in the tabs. I can report little except the depressing news that 85% of people who go to her website are female. That is horrible; naturally men don\'t actually fancy women with silicone bodies and, by now, rather harsh, aggressive faces. But she has become a role model for young women who want to make themselves rich and famous almost exclusively for being rich and famous.
• I was back at the Cartoon Museum this week – cannot keep away. There\'s a great drawing there by Chris Riddell showing Margaret Thatcher as Shelley\'s Ozymandias: "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair." The vast prime ministerial head is half-buried in the lone and level sands.
When he acquired it, Kenneth Baker, one of her most loyal ministers, asked her and Denis Thatcher to sign it. She looked suspicious. "But it\'s fallen down," she said. "Just sign it, please," he replied, and they did. It might be worth a fortune one day: supposing a Gillray or Rowlandson had been autographed by the prime minister or king who was its victim! Sometimes genteel philistinism has advantages.
• The American humorist PJ O\'Rourke says that if anyone ever tells you that things were better in the good old days, just say the one word "dentistry". He\'s right. I can\'t remember when I was last in agony at the dentist. Once I even had root canal work in the morning and was back at my desk that afternoon. The other day, I had to have a tooth out. The dentist and his nurse chatted away while I went numb. He put the kit inside my mouth and a few seconds later the tooth was gone. What was amazing was that I felt only the slightest discomfort afterwards. That\'s just a wonderful modern thing, like the internet, cars that start on cold mornings and modern ice cream that doesn\'t taste of lard, which it did when I was a boy.
• A reader – and I am ashamed to say I have lost his letter – writes to say that he enjoyed the Barry Cryer gags I quoted, but feels the funniest joke ever was the late Bob Monkhouse\'s: "They laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they\'re not laughing now. "I can see why he likes it. It has the off-the-wall, out of left-field quality of a great gag.
Monkhouse was, shall we say, somewhat generous when it came to crediting jokes to himself. My favourite was: "When it\'s my time to go, I want to die like my father — peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming in terror, like his passengers." He told that on TV in the mid-1990s, but then I heard the same joke on a Garrison Keillor Lake Wobegon tape from years earlier. Maybe it actually dates back to the 19th century.
In my continuing effort to get readers to write this column for me, I\'d like to ask what joke makes you laugh most. This being the Guardian, they don\'t have to be clean, but perhaps not too filthy. And short, if at all possible.
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