Pas de Quoi
R9D1.[MP-U
By STRIX
When, almost exactly ten years ago, this diagnosis of our nation's economic ills appeared in the SPECTATOR, nobody had heard of the Gnomes of Zurich; nor, as yet, were the Hun- garian vedettes discernible on the skyline, wait- ing to close in on the foundering wagon-train below.
Peering through the chevaux de Irise of graphs which the intervening years have thrown up—Cost of Living, Balance of Payments, Gold and Convertible Currency Reserves, and all the rest of them—I can find only one ground on which to call this diagnosis in question. It is that the diagnostician was Strix.
Jeeves ! Hand Me My Claymore !
'GROUSE SHOOT AT ARGYLL. There's a mist on the moors and the air is still. Only the shrill cry of the soaring falcons breaks the deep silence. The day has yielded its share of sport and with the last drive of the red grouse from the heather, the retrievers halt and the gunners gather like ancient clansmen to behold their quarry. It is at moments like this that men of action the world over seek the companionship of Gold Label—the internationally acclaimed cigar of superb aroma and masculine mildness.'
I suppose there is a risk that Nemesis may overtake the copy-writer who wrote this splendid stuff for a full-page advertisement in Time and other American magazines; some pedant may point out to a senior executive of his firm that he is not as deeply versed in his chosen subject as he should be. If this happens, he might quote in extenuation of his lapse this passage from In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, a highly- esteemed best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic: 'The pheasant season in Kansas, a formal November event, lures hordes of sportsmen from adjoining states, and during the past week plaid- hatted regiments had paraded across the autumnal expanses, flushing and felling with rounds of buckshot great coppery flights of the grain-fattened birds.'
If they can't get it right in Kansas, they'll never get it right at Argyll.
Lines Telegraphed to Lucinda at the — Theatre, W1
There was a young actress called Luce Who was constantly making debuce; When she hit the West End I could not but send Her a greeting, however abstruce.
Meanwhile, Back at the Custard-Pie Factory ...
An Oxford undergraduate, required to write an essay analysing current trends in the evolu- tion of British Socialism, ended it with these words: 'There arc only two things wrong with Mr Harold Wilson—his face.'
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