Trundle

We're rearranging our finances. We've remortgaged our house and we're paying off our credit cards and we're getting a new car though Motability. Ailz is the one who understands these things. I have always been afraid of money.

The way I see it in my head is the wagon has got one of its wheels stuck in a puddle. A deep puddle- a pre-macadam puddle- a Jane Austen era puddle. And the farm hands have come out of the fields in their smocks and they push and they push and the driver whips up the carthorse and one bloody big heave and we're on our way again. Trundle, trundle, trundle....

Phew!

Constable might have painted this- or Stubbs.

But the road isn't going to get any less bloody awful.

Bernard Manning

Bernard Manning has died. When I told Ailz she said, "Oh good"- thinking I meant Bernard Matthews the turkey-twizzler man. When I explained, no- Bernard Manning the comedian, she was sorry. She'd been to the Embassy Club a couple of times (before I knew her) and on the second visit he recognised her and came and sat at her table and shook her hand and was an all round good egg.

That's what people are saying about him- people who knew him. He was a kind man, generous to his friends, did a lot for charity and blah, blah, blah.

He also- this keeps cropping up- was technically brilliant.  No-one could time a line the way he could.

He denied he was a racist. Or sometimes he did. He was just a funny man telling jokes, he said; the racist persona was an act- so lighten up.  Who knows? But if it was just an act doesn't that make it worse? 

Doesn't it make him unprincipled?

But I don't believe he ever really thought things through. I think he was lazy. He'd found a style that worked for him- and by the time people started asking awkward questions about it he was too old to change.  If he'd been a thinking man he'd never have gone down that path in the first place.

I don't want to dance on his grave.  He's part of our social history now. He belongs to us, we can't disown him and maybe it can be spun as proof of just how tolerant we are that all through our era- in spite of the race relations bureacracy and middleclass morality and the rise and fall of alternative comedy- it was still possible for a fat, ugly, white man in a tux to make money- pots and pots of money-  telling playground jokes about coons and pakis and poofs.