Last Meal
We have been hosted by wonderfully kind and generous hosts, and we have enjoyed excellent, wide-ranging debates on, you name it, we have discussed it.
Last evening, we chose what we would select as our last meal before we were to be shot!
Here’s mine. First, a well-made Bloody Mary. It’s a sad fact that hardly anyone knows how to make one. It isn’t a drink, it’s an art form!
A glass full of top-class tomato juice, at least a quarter of a squeezed lemon, a decent amount of Worcester sauce to colour the mix light brown, a quarter spoonful of horse radish sauce, a shot of vodka, and crucially, a shot of medium dry sherry, then a sprinkling of pepper. Add ice. Shake it up, and it’s nectar.
Thence to the supper.
A dozen oysters, with Worcester sauce and half a lemon. Two slices of brown bread and butter. Two glasses of white burgundy.
Then, a medium-rare small fillet steak with boiled new potatoes flavoured with mint, hollandaise sauce if available, and fresh peas. A salad with fresh lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, and a light French dressing. Two glasses of red burgundy.
Raspberries and cream. A glass of iced kümmel.
Coffee
A Bendicks bittermint.
I am now ready to be shot.
Tom Benyon’s Schooldays
Such were the joys of being flogged on my 10-year-old bare bum at Edinburgh’s Angusfield House School. I have no recollection of what my offence could possibly have been – though it couldn’t have mattered much, for it didn’t take a lot for “Tud” (the pervert’s nickname) to bend us over his tweedy knees, stare gleefully at our pink buttocks and inflict pain.
Today, this three-flush floater of a headmaster – whose name prudence dictates I should avoid mentioning – would have ended up serving at least six years at His Majesty’s Pleasure. But those were the days, my friends, that’s just how it was. I got off relatively lightly compared to some of my “pretty” friends who dumbly suffered serious abuse – and the prettier they were, the worse the misery. Would our parents – my father was an Edwardian – have known what to do if I had confided in them? Would they, or the police and the courts for that matter, have understood the long-lasting effects that sexual molestation has on children? I doubt it.
And the abuse and bullying grew dramatically worse at public school. Christopher Hitchens relates the tale of a friend captured in 1943 and put to work on the infamous Thai-Burma railway.
Five young officers were sitting in a stinking cell waiting to be interrogated. The heat was stifling, the latrine, a hole in the floor. Mosquitoes and bugs had chosen this particular as their Far Eastern rendezvous, for they clustered in swarms. The screams of an officer being beaten and tortured in an adjacent cell grew to a crescendo.
One of the five, Hitchen’s friend, fell asleep, and soon the exhausted man was in the grip of a nightmare. He began to moan, then shriek and writhe.
“Oh, please stop!” he shouted. “Please stop! I can’t bear the pain anymore.”
His neighbour shook him awake. The man glanced round the cell and muttered, “Oh thank God! I dreamed I was back at Tonbridge School.”
A to B
Cars are for getting from one place to another, no more, no less. I am always astonished at the sums people squander on them. It all boils down to the vanity of, “Hello Sunshine… I’m much richer than you!”
Yesterday, I noticed a man sitting in his parked car. Without warning, his sidelights began to semaphore, and then his boot beeped loudly, rising and falling like a runaway guillotine. We couldn’t stop laughing as he tried, wholly unsuccessfully, to control the display. But the more he banged on the buttons, the faster the lights seemed to flash – and the boot was having none of it!
On the (admittedly, remote) off-chance that a motor manufacturer ever reads this, please stop adding electronic accessories to new cars! All they ever do (apart from adding to the gaiety of amused onlookers) is to increase the already vast cost of the car – and they always go wrong, wrong, wrong…