27 JANUARY 1967, Page 4

Table Talk

Tune in on a London dinner party con- versation and chances are the subject will be the latest Brown indiscretion.'—Mr Anthony Lewis in the Observer.

I fairly frequently go out to dine And hear the gossips talk of this and that And most of them are talking through their hat And all of them attempt to shoot a line, And those who are too tight to hold their wine Fall sideways, backwards, or, it may be, flat, Confiding their last wisdom to the mat. Has your experience been the same as mine?

Yet, though I've seen them pickled, sloshed and sluiced,

I've never seen a single Fleet Street clown So up the pole that he was quite reduced

To telling silly tales of Georgie Brown.

One knows the form, and yet I wonder what Induces journalists to write such rot.

CHRISTOPHER HOLL iS