The most callous case of granny dumping Henley police have ever encountered.
SpeedApril 18th, 2010
Had Alex and I picked up hitchhikers as we drove home through France last week, (hypothetical of course as the Golf couldn’t take another half of rosé), they would have been mystified when she, at irregular intervals, would say “Bollocks” in a testy voice as she stared out the passenger window, then again – a little louder and more aggressively this time – and finally turn to me and shout the word in my ear, at which point I would jab a button on the steering wheel, the abuse would instantly stop and the journey continued as if nothing had happened. Had the hitchhikers, however, chosen to perform a parachute role out the rear door as we slowed at the first roundabout in a bid to retain their sanity, they’d never have discovered the cause of this bizarre ritual…… Our second-hand Golf, you see, came with a coloured satnav map in the central console plus a cruder arrow guidance system by the speedometer. Trouble is, they occasionally disagree – Alex’s will say fork left, mine will say fork right – and at such times my arrow system has proved more reliable than her prettier rolling map. That said, during such discrepancies the air turns blue as we debate the choice and it was during one of these shout-ins that I somehow pressed one of the four mystery buttons on the steering wheel and my second-opinion navigation aid was replaced with a screen offering average mpg, estimated arrival time and remaining fuel. So Alex took the wheel and somehow got it back, but every time she passed 53 mph there’d be a warning buzzer and she’d lose it again, finally learning by elimination that in hitting the bottom left mystery button, the trusted guidance arrow returned. (Check the satnav manual, you say? Please – to us technophobes, it could be written in Urdu). So when I took over the driving again with strict instructions to touch nothing, I had to either maintain 54 mph through sleepy French villages and 52 mph on autoroutes, or continue with Alex’s obscure solution. In a bid to lighten the mood I likened the situation to ‘Speed’ where Sandra Bullock, (or ‘Bollocks’ as we affectionately know her), has to maintain 50 mph driving a coach or a bomb planted on board explodes. Sandra, though, doesn’t have failing hearing like me, hence the need for Alex’s urgent calls whenever she heard the buzzer and why, but for a full load of wine, there might be a trail of gibbering hitchhikers still lying in our wake. We’re home now, the glitch remains but there are definite signs of goodwill returning and the Golf’s due for a service soon where there’s bound to be a lad at the garage who can read Urdu. Opera NotesApril 2nd, 2010
The Royal Opera House’s forthcoming production based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith might offend the cognoscenti, but what a story line….. At eighteen she married a kitchen hand while working at Jim’s Crispy Fried Chicken Restaurant near Waco,Texas; when the marriage failed she moved to Houston but her lack of talent as a topless dancer had her switched to the lunchtime shift where as luck would have it lonely octogenarian oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall II would pass an hour. When she was asked if it was love at sight, (shades of Mrs. Merton asking Debbie McGee what first attracted her to the millionaire Paul Daniels), Anna Nicole revealed it was his liver spots that turned her on. He married her, ignoring the sixty three-year age gap and paying for the 44DD breast implants which brought her Playboy shoots and her own TV show, but within a year he’d died, leaving her half his fortune. Happy endings are bad news in operas and sure enough Anna Nicole spent the next five years in failed bids to get her hands on the cash, ballooning to fifteen stone by her bankruptcy hearing and finally dying of a drug overdose in a Florida hotel. Such was her fame that when a judge burst into tears when awarding custody of the body, he was promptly offered his own TV show. But hold that curtain! Act Three centres on her funeral, (for which she wore a designer ball gown with matching tiara and a light dusting of her 44 DDs with J. Howard’s ashes), where her two ex’s stared each other down across the nave and her mother arrived to a chorus of booing. She was thirty nine. Casting’s a cinch – Covent Garden have fat ladies coming out their arias – but the uninspired title of ‘Anna Nicole’ will have to go – for the life story of a thwarted topless dancer, it has to be, ‘If She Wants to Rigoletto.’ Any Particular Table?March 6th, 2010
Fifteen months after the Mumbai terrorist attacks, security remains very… well, Indian. Sort of ho-hum karma. Hotels check beneath cars with mirrors on rollerskates; some look in the glovebox, some glance at the luggage, few do both. It gets more perfunctory as the queue and hooting grows but with Mumbai traffic it’s hard to know what’s queue and what isn’t, what’s road rage and what’s habit. |