Dear Hugh 6
Thursday May 12th 2005
DEAR HUGH,
It may not surprise you to hear that there has been a complaint. Frankly, I was astonished at the audacity of the moan and I was of a mind to write back and say “get stuffed” when the chaps in the legal department here explained that that everybody had to be PC these days. I said to them don’t start lecturing me about the meaning of acronyms, where I come from PC stands for “pushy coon” and what’s wrong with that?
Anyway, it has transpired that apparently I’ve upset BMW. Another acronym, which I believe stands for Bavarian Military Wanderlust or some such. It seems that the Kaiser’s Kin have taken exception to me recently suggesting in this column that their cars are favoured by pushers and gangsters.
Typical! So it’s my fault that hoodlums buy their cars. I said to them, don’t blame me; why don’t you just not sell to hooligans? And, of course, being clever, they said how should they go about doing that and I said they should put a poster up in the showroom saying “ACTUNG! NEIN RAP FANS” and they got all huffy.
Not that you’d catch me in a BMW. I mean, nice mountains and all that and the bier’s fairly good cop, but ever since BM made itself the Laurel And Hardly of the motor game by buying Skoda, how can you be sure that you’re buying a dream machine and not a disguised chunk of eastern gunk? I know they’ll say it’s legit but it wasn’t so long ago that they were saying “Oops! Did we go round the Maginot Line? Silly us! Oh well, seeing as we’re here anyway we might as well bomb you”.
By the way, some clever clogs on the subs’ desk has come over to say that it’s Volkswagen and not BMW that owns Skoda. As if that changes my point one jot.
Mind you, I do have to be careful what I write here because apparently these days you can’t go around suggesting that we resort back to thwacking skivers with sticks outside the Jobcentre. Apparently I’m not even allowed to call people skivers; according to the EC or something you can only call them Temporarily Unfulfilled Merchants of Labour or something as easy to remember.
And I’ve just been told that apparently you can’t call them “tossers” either.
So, as I say, I have to watch my words. Look at what happened to old Kilroy-Silk and I don’t mean all the offers of a shag that he gets. No, I mean all of that Arab malarkey when that bloke who’s obviously just got contact lenses, Quack Straw or some such, got all arsey about Kilroy daring to mention the acquired Middle Eastern taste of lopping a bird’s head off for charvering anybody other than her old man.
Naturally, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that if they didn’t have any oil, you’d be able to call them more names than you can shake a stick at. But perhaps it does take somebody of above the average wit to predict that the Saudis are going to really catch it in the neck when their wells dry up in 2025. Talk about letting it all out; everybody’s going to be on their case, especially about them wearing dresses to the G8 meetings.
Anyway, the point is that I’ve got to be damn careful what I write about, so the least said about the Arabs. Lovely people. Nice sand.
By the way, I forgot to thank you for your kind gift of that dried tea that you sent me with the postcard from Amsterdam . A slightly bitter taste, perhaps, but I rather like it. I’ve been having a drop while I’ve been writing this. As I say, odd tang to it. And it doesn’t half seem to speed up your sense of time; I feel like I’ve been writing for days.
Or is it slows time down? I can never work it out. Work what out? What time? Where? How did I get here?
Anyway, your tea is very pleasant – although I do find that it makes me utterly famished; if I’m dunking I need an entire pack of digestives. And some chocolate on the side. With a cheese and pickle sarnie and any crisps that are going spare.
Here’s another thing. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this but my diet does not appear to be working very well. Odd, because I’ve not touched a drop for almost four weeks now. They said that the weight would “fall off” if I stopped drinking. Curiously not, though. All that seems to happen is that I’m drinking a lot of tea. But I appear to be laughing a great deal more, so that’s something.
Must go; feeling a bit peckish.
GB