Personal column

Geoffrey Bocca

Returning to London, I was depressed to find that the American 'you-know' tongue-torture has penetrated our islands. Originally black and female, the torture now knows neither race, sex nor coastal water. You know what I mean.

Until the you-know fix became an international addiction, 1 always held that linguistic constipation was regional. I always associate the English with endless repetitions of "And-so-on-and-so-forth'." "This-that-andthe-other" I associate with Australians, Rhodesians, Anglo-Argentines and similar lost Anglophone tribes. The English language is not the only language to suffer. There are Italian women who say "in somma" so regularly they sometimes seem to have a vocabulary of only two words. An interesting variation is presented by the chatty Brooklyn taxi driver who ends every sentence with 'You understand what I'm telling ya?",.which translates directly into the upper-class French female sentence-ending, "Vous comprenez qu'est ce que je vous dis?"

At least the British seem to have come to acknowledge that this is not the language of human beings, but of sheep. So riow they intersperse every few seconds of their conversation with "blah-blah-blah." Compared with "blah-blah-blah," I prefer "you-know." And so on and so forth.

Sticky wicket

Last summer, in New York, an Australian friend and I decided to take our American secretaries up to Van Cortlandt Park for a picnic, and to explain cricket to them. They were bright girls. They seemed to understand. They nodded and said, "Yes." When we explained that runs could be scored behind the batsman and not only in front as in baseball, they said "Oh!". Leaving the park, the girls went ahead, and we heard one say to the other, "When I realised that the two guys with the bats were on the same side, it began to slot in."

February news

"I wonder what will happen exciting today" is my favourite quotation from Piglet in Winnie the Pooh. For some reason, the dreary month of February always throws up a great human story. One can scarcely call Watergate a February story because it overlapped a year on each side. But it warmed the February of last year. February of 1972 had the New York Times baying for the blood of Robert Having of the New York Metropolitan Museum for the dubious manner by which he acquired a Greek vase. The Thunderer thundered day after day for a month. Having dusted himself off. He is still there. The February before that was the high summer (sic) of Clifford Irving. My forecast is that this February, Lord Lucan will turn up.

Pretty papers

Private Eye keeps on taking its licks at Fleet Street, and especially the Daily Express. I could find this funny, but don't. Some time ago, in the Portobello Road, I investigated an old chest of drawers, and found that the drawers were lined with pages from a Daily Express of June, 1939. Sefton Delmer and Hilde Marchant had front-page by-lines. One St John Philby had lost his deposit representing some crackpot party in a by-election.

But this did not fascinate me as much as the make-up. What an artist was Arthur Chris

tiansen! All the pages, news, fashion, sport, were beautiful enough to frame. Everything had class and style and self-confidence.

I stole the pages and held them side by side with the Express of the day. Private Eye did not make me laugh. Will the Express, I wonder, follow the fate of that other great newspaper of tactile beauty, the New York Herald Tribune? The Trib, wobbling, completely changed its format into a formless mush. It ran a frenetic advertising campaign saying "a serious newspaper doesn't need to be dull." Well, the Trib was always a dull paper but it was beautiful. Ugly to boot, it never had a prayer.

Firing lines

I/ last saw Arthur Christiansen in the Cairo Hilton about a year before his death. He was still bitterly obsessed about his dismissal as editor of the Express, perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly. Wrongly because another heart attack while on the job would certainly have killed him, rightly because his dismissal did kill him. "You have no idea, Geoff, how ruthlessly they fired me," he said. (We were both smashed, I should add.) I was tempted to say, "What about the ruthless way you fired me, you sonofabitch, back when I was twenty-two and enjoyed the reputation of being the worst sub-editor in all Fleet Street. You kicked me out in a freezing February (February, see? Human story), and 1 had to go off to the former' American colonies, steerage, to make my fortune." (Reader, the reason I didn't say just that was because, to the end of his days, Chris scared me out of my wits.) What I said was, "There, there, Chrish, don't cry, ole buddy."

Crazy for zrazy

A glorious twelve days at sea last September in the Polish liner, Stefan Batory, from Montreal to Gdynia, made me resolve never again to tell Polish jokes; henceforth I would adhere strictly to Irish. I was wrong. The Poles are a joke in themselves, and can't see it. Drooling over the Polish specialities, I kept bugging the chef for recipes, especially a certain zrazy. The chef complained. The ship's doctor promised to send me a Polish cookbook. In due course I received Kuchina Polska, an unusually attractive edition fora Communist publishing house, with colour photographs. It was, however in Polish. Big deal. I studied the index, and there was a whole column of zrazies. There was zrazy cielecie bite w sosie naturalnya, and zrazy wieprzowe bite duszone. Things like that.

Back in Gdynia, however, the penny dropped. The doctor remembered I spoke no Polish (though when I realised that a zlotie was money and not a little Dutch whore, and chlodnik was a cold soup and not the incumbent in the White House, things began to look up). A few days after Kuchina Polska arrived, I received a Polish-English dictionary from .Gdynia, just to help. I did consult it. According to the dictionary there is no such word as zrazy. So I still don't know what it is, but it's delicious.