This year’s Booker International prizewinner, ‘A horse walks into a bar’, follows the routine of an over-the-hill stand-up comic as he coaxes and manipulates his audience, painfully aware that one failed joke could send the entire act crashing through the stage floor. I often wonder why modern politicians don’t take their cue from stand-up comedians.…
A Sheikh’s home is his English castle
'Cry — God for Harry! England and Saint George!' This year marks the 600th anniversary of King Henry V's victory over the French at the Battle of Agincourt. While Britain has had quite a successful run over the years overrunning other countries, it is almost exactly 950 years since Albion was last invaded. (We prefer to connect the…
Saving Income Tax
Early in my tax career, in my role as stenographer, porter and punkawallah to the great and the good, I was instructed to join one of the senior partners at a meeting with Roy E. Disney's right-hand man. The conversation was going well (I had a walk-on part taking notes and fluttering my eyelashes, or whatever pseudo secretaries were supposed…
What’s in a name?
The first poem I studied in secondary school began: "The pig lay on a barrow dead, motionless". Poet Laureate Ted Hughes' ensuing nine sickeningly graphic, non-rhyming stanzas made me want to vomit and scuppered any chance that Wordsworth, Byron or Shelley might offer the key to my romantic soul. It was not surprising, therefore, that the death of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney a…
Chanson d’Amour
I don't think it is a coincidence that the French Government proposed a new Culture Tax in the same week as tonight's Eurovision Song Contest. The Europeans have made some pretty bad mistakes over the years such as two World Wars, the Euro and Belgium. On the other hand, like the Common Market and the Division…
Brussels Sprouts
"I never forget a face, but in your case I will be glad to make an exception". Groucho Marx's famous line haunted me the other day as I tried, in vain, to remember the name, face or other distinguishing feature of the first (and only) person I ever met who worked in Brussels with the…
Losing Marx
"Another decade is traveling through, and I’m here, and you are there." Growing up in England, I was always taught that showing emotion was a weakness. So, as I read the above line in the New York Times the other day a fleck of dust must have popped into my eye and made it, and its twin,…
Of the people, by the people, for the people
In the early days of my marriage an ageing, newly acquired relative informed me that - other than the price - there was no difference between Johnnie Walker and Tesco's no-frills, own-brand blended whisky. The market survey was not long in coming when, the following weekend, a visitor involuntarily sprayed the contents of a freshly…
Blessed are the consumers (part 1)
One of my first memories as a child is of the working forge across the road from our home where rag-and-bone men and other deniers of the 20th century could take their carthorses to be shod. A couple of days ago I was driving with my son through an ultra-orthodox enclave, where the regular upkeep of roads…
Just another argy-bargy
Adrian Mole, aged 15 years and 1 day, wrote in his diary on April 3, 1982: "10am. Woke my father up to tell him Argentina has invaded the Falklands. He shot out of bed because he thought the Falklands lay off the coast of Scotland. When I pointed out that they were eight thousand miles…
Tax Break 