DIARY KEITH WATERHOUSE
Idid not attend last week's party to cele- brate the 150th birthday of Punch. It was held in the Victoria and Albert Museum and if I had been the editor I wouldn't have bothered to go home. I am told that the bash was dominated by young Suits all des- perately looking to the future. We older hands, of course, are supposed to look back upon an age of curate's eggs on which the sun never set. In fact although I wrote for the magazine for 30 years — 40, actually, but for the first ten they kept sending the stuff back — and was a member of the Table for a decade (I think I am the only Table member ever to resign, which I did when it came to be dominated by market- ing men, like the stoats and weasels taking over Toad Hall), I feel remarkably unsenti- mental about my Punch days. My only mementoes, apart from a few volumes of collected pieces by my friends and myself, are a souvenir place mat and an obituary of an old contributor, Mortimer Collins (1827-76) which I cherish:
The Everlasting Silence has suddenly come down upon a clear, joyous and musical voice.... Mortimer Collins, in the apparent fulness of health and strength, has been car- ried off by disease of the heart, induced it may be, certainly brought to a head, by the wear and tear of literary labour, which for many years past had known no intermission, not even for the ordinary interval of a brief yearly holiday. In the most literal sense, he died in harness. The natural end,' the Cynic may say, 'of the literary hack.' As Journalist (Provincial and Metropolitan), Essayist, Crit- ic, Novelist, Poet, Mortimer Collins had done much gay and genial, much graceful and scholarly work; though the best of it, no doubt, might, with more leisure, have been better. He wrote The Secret of Long Life to teach men to live a century, and himself died at 49.
When some former contributors and ex- editors formed the Punch Table In Exile (once founded it quickly foundered, as these things do), we called it the Mortimer Collins Club.
Another 40-year tie I anticipate break- ing is my membership of the National Union of Journalists, if its deposed general secretary Steve Turner, an old colleague, is not restored to office. I voted for Turner because he opposes a merger with the Irish Print Union, with whom British journalists have as much in common as with the Nor- mandy apple farmers. This would be a back-door preliminary to other mergers resulting in a single media union. For cam- paigning for a ballot on this grisly prospect Turner was first obstructed by his national executive and has now been fired by it. With its impertinent moralistic guidelines and political posturing, the NUJ has already got up the noses of many of its
members. This merger business, if pursued, will produce the opposite of what its fanati- cal supporters want — a breakaway union or mass defections to the NUJ's less hot- headed rival, the Institute of Journalists. I wonder why they haven't tumbled to this. As Jeffrey Bernard put it in another con- text, you can see a train when it's coming, can't you?
In a London club the other day someone I know but slightly addressed me as Water- house. I was surprised — pleasantly, I think. I have not been called by my bald surname since I was a conscript. Nowadays we are all on first name terms with people we haven't even met. Last week a young editor, on being referred to my literary agents, David Higham Associates, said, `Yes, right, I'll give David a ring.' David has been dead for many years and for many years before that was old enough to be her great-grandfather. I don't really want to go back to the days when we used to Smith and Jones one another, but I do think familiarity has got a shade over-familiar. In a television interview Cecil Parkinson repeatedly referred to the Prime Minister as John. Not on. In the United States, that most informal of countries, not even his intimates would refer to the President by his first name.
Having had occasion to revise my will recently, I was reminded how extraordinari- ly difficult it is for a city dweller without a regular job to find two independent wit- nesses. If you work in an office, it is simply a matter of requesting two colleagues to sign on the dotted line. If you live in a vil- lage, the doctor and the vicar will oblige, although the vicar will not be best pleased to realise that there can't be anything in it for the steeple fund. But if you live an anonymous urban life, to whom do you turn? You don't know the neighbours. The Sainsbury's checkout girls are too busy. You can't really invite two friends round to a will-signing party. In the end I had to go back to my solicitors and get a couple of their clerks to do the deed. I will probably now receive a supplementary bill: 'To wait- ing upon you and witnessing your will....' But why do wills have to be witnessed any- way? They can be forged, of course, but so can cheques, and I don't need two witness- es when I make over huge sums to the Inland Revenue. Then a will may be signed under duress, but witnessing is no safe- guard there either, the standard practice being to drug the rich widow to the eyeballs and then get her to sign in front of two half-witted housemaids.
Whatever else we may expect from John Birt, the BBC director general in waiting, his reputation as a• compulsive memo-writer leaves little hope that he will clean up the appalling jargon which infests the Corporation's considerable output of `in-house wordage. Announcing 'a new bi- media plan for Europe', the News and Cur- rent Affairs Directorate's newsletter, known to the inmates as Pravda, reports that when the Paris television bureau clos- es, 'two of the resource teams will move to Brussels, retaining one multi-skilled re- source post. The TV producer post will become bi-media and broadcast- capable. . • .' Does no one have a mission to explain this gobbledygook?
Nature notes. A while ago a pigeon built a nest in the shrubbery outside my bedroom window in Earls Court. Presently two eggs appeared. With a great deal of persistent cooing, the pigeon — or pigeons I should say, for I gather that the female incubates by night while the male incubates by day — settled on the nest. Weeks passed. My next pigeon fact, gleaned from the encyclopaedia, is that the incubation period is 14 to 19 days. This one seemed to have overshot the mark, for a good month had by now elapsed. What we had there, I guessed, was two dud eggs. The day-shift pigeon evidently agreed, for it abandoned the nest, although the night-nurse pigeon remained on duty. I went away for a few days. Upon my return, I looked out of the bedroom window and there were now four eggs in the nest. Nesting operations resumed. A fortnight or so went by, then I came back from a weekend in Brighton to find the eggs down to two again. No sign of pigeon. No broken eggs under nest. That was a week ago. Yesterday I returned from a trip north and carried out my by now rou- tine nest inspection. Only one egg. No pigeon. No fledglings, which (pigeon fact No 3) are supposed to remain nestbound for two weeks. Question to ornithologists : what is going on here?
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