69 for 1

The Dog it Was That Died

All Except the Bastard

The Sanity Inspector

Golfing for Cats

The Collected Bulletins of Idi Amin

The Further Bulletins of Idi Amin

The Lady From Stalingrad Mansions

The Peanut Papers

The Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz

Tissues for Men

The Best of Alan Coren

The Cricklewood Diet

Bumf

Present Laughter (Editor)

Something for the Weekend?

Bin Ends

Seems Like Old Times

More Like Old Times

A Year in Cricklewood

Toujours Cricklewood

Alan Coren’s Sunday Best

Animal Passions (Editor)

A Bit on the Side

The Cricklewood Dome

The Alan Coren Omnibus

Waiting for Jeffrey

For children

Buffalo Arthur

The Lone Arthur

Arthur the Kid

Railroad Arthur

Klondike Arthur

Arthur’s Last Stand

Arthur and the Great Detective

Arthur and the Bellybutton Diamond

Arthur v the Rest

Arthur and the Purple Panic

Y
OU
have just picked this up in your local bookshop, to have a bit of a flip, have a bit of a dip, possibly have a root
around in your wallet – if I can give you some idea of what
69 For
1 means. Tricky. If I were Humpty Dumpty I might declare that it means just what I choose it to mean, and since I
have, as you will shortly hear, much in common with Humpty Dumpty, I suppose I could leave it at that; but I shan’t, because you might irritably snap the book shut and look for something by a
less arrogant hack.

69 For 1 means two things – neither of them sexual, since you ask, otherwise it would be called 69 For 2 – and the first thing it means is that 69 pieces constitute 1 book. The
second thing is that the author of these pieces has just become 69. Nothing to celebrate there, you say, no kind of milestone, but it is for me, because I nearly didn’t become it. Last year,
I was very nearly 68 all out. That is the much I have in common with Humpty Dumpty; the one thing we do not, fortunately, have in common, is that all the king’s horses and all the
king’s men were able to put me together again. Or, rather, all the king’s physicians, surgeons, anaesthetists, radiographers, nurses, etc, since had it been left to his horses, I should
unquestionably have been done for.

What nearly did that, mind, nobody knows for sure; but on a hot summer’s night last year, spotting me in the French moonlight, something bit me as I snored: could have been a gnat, could
have been a scorpion, could have been a werewolf, it left no note, merely a breach into which a billion opportunist streptococci plunged and set up a colony called Septicaemia. It is an inclement
little country, where your flesh falls off, thanks to the national sport: sassy newspapers call it necrotising fasciitis, the red-tops prefer flesh-eating disease, but however you slice it, slicing
it is what has to be done, and within a couple of hours that is what the terrific surgeons of Nice’s Hôpital Saint-Roche were doing.

They put my conked-out organs on a lot of machines to do it, too, and kept me on them for ages, seriously threatening the French National Grid: a thousand kilometres away, Parisian diners would
glance up from their
soupe de poisson
and wonder why the lights were flickering.

I stayed in the coma for a month, and while, when I eventually emerged, it was a considerable relief to my dearest – who had become even more my nearest by putting their lives on hold in
order to be there for mine – it was something of a disappointment, too. For by Hollywood tradition, when a month-long sleeper emerges from his coma, he either cries ‘Hallo trees! Hallo
sky!’ to his surrounding loved ones, or else explains to them that he had the near-death experience of floating through a long tunnel at the end of which (in my case, at least) James Thurber
and Bernard Levin were waiting with a dry martini to welcome him aboard and direct him to the wingmakers.

According, however, to Mrs Coren and my children, my first words were ‘Get me a hand-grenade!’, because, they discovered as I gabbled on, I had got it into my comatose head that I
was in occupied France, and the Boche were at the gate, drawn thither by collaborators who had spotted the shortwave radio in the cardboard suitcase under my bed.

Fortunately, my clapped-out mind was eventually set at rest, and returned with my repairing body to England, where it soon became 69. So I am the one for which 69 is. I did think of calling the
book
69 Not Out,
but then I had this feeling that I’d already tempted providence enough.

I
N
the high and far off times, Best Beloved, before the good Lord smiled upon him and made him my gracious Mayor, Ken
Livingstone and I both lived in Cricklewood, a stone’s throw from one another; though this distance, despite the occasional temptation, was never actually verified. Since then we have both
moved closer to the epicentre of the fiefdom he has made all his own, but, because you may take the boy out of Cricklewood but not Cricklewood out of the boy, our paths, I find, have crossed again.
Yokels both, each had his dream of the metropolis; but, heartbreakingly, they have turned out to be very different dreams. I never guessed: though I have run into him a fair few times since those
idyllic peripolitan days, mostly when we were engaged upon daft broadcast parlour games concerned with bluff, deceit and guesswork – at all of which Ken unsurprisingly proved to be
brilliantly adept – we never talked about these dreams of ours. But it is time to talk of them now, before it is too late for either of us.

The Mayor, I learn from an exhibition at his shiny new City Hall, has a vision of transfiguring the Marylebone Road: he wishes it not only to become London’s Champs-Elysées but to
be connected via Regent’s Park to Primrose Hill, a mile or so to its north, by a further broad boulevard, and by a yet further broader one, to Bankside in the south. Ken’s field of
dreams is the Fields of Heaven. Silly arse.

Do I hear you cry that this slur is as gratuitously offensive as it is utterly baffling, given that the very place where I now hang my Cricklewood hat-collection lies bang in the middle of
Regent’s Park, between Primrose Hill and the Marylebone Road, exactly equidistant from each and thus the very nub of what will be the wondrous Champs Livingstone? How can I not relish the
notion of, any day now, springing down my front steps on a fine summer morning, twirling my malacca cane, to join the elegant throng of coutured boulevardiers strolling the broad avenues beneath
the sighing shade-trees, pausing only to tip my panama and exchange charming compliments and scintillating ripostes before popping in to take a
filtre et fine
at any one of a hundred
fashionable pavement cafes, every one of them packed to the geranium gunwales with the artists and writers and singers and actors who have flocked here from all over the world? Oh, look,
isn’t that Pablo Hirst doodling dots on a menu that will make his waiter rich, even as, beside him, F. Scott Amis explains to Salman Hemingway that the rich are different from you and me,
while his wife Zelda pirouettes naked atop a passing taxi (‘You’ll never guess who I had on the roof of the cab last week’), and blow me down if that isn’t Gertrude Rowling
telling Enrico Manilow that a nose is a nose is a nose, to the delighted doeskin-clad clapping of some 83 of the ravishing catwalk soubrettes who have recently appeared in
The Vagina
Monologues
and are therefore here this morning to pose for the magic brush of Rolf de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Oh, get off! ‘This is London’, as Britain used to Morse to France in the days when the Champs-Elysées teemed shoulder-to-shoulder with marching Nazis, delighted to have found
a street roomy enough to do their thing in; because the Champs-Elysées, may I remind Ken, is six times wider than the Marylebone Road. Indeed, it has more than once occurred to me that
Hitler may well have abandoned his 1940 invasion plans for no better reason than that London’s main thoroughfares were so narrow: had they all parachuted onto Hampstead Heath, as was mooted,
it is more than likely that the German Army would have jackbooted into gridlock halfway down Finchley Road, where they would have been picked off like fish in a barrel.