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Y
OU
would not, 1500 years ago today, have found me pecking spasmodically at the dawn keyboard.

You would – but only if you had been minded to abseil riskily from a rampart and squint through a loophole – have found me having a net: that is, rehearsing a few top swishes at a
big wooden dragon with my burnished broadsword, the gelid flagstones of my bedchamber ringing to the twinkling sabatons upon my knightly feet, my sturdy calves flexing beneath their smart crested
greaves, a poleyn hingeing on each noble knee with the silent slickness that only goose grease can confer, and a bright cuisse flashing on each sinewy thigh; while, downstairs, my loyal squire sat
devotedly buffing tasset and pauldron and vambrace, and anything else he could identify from his master’s trusty thesaurus.

Or possibly not. The sixth-century class structure being, as I understand it, a tad less flexible than today’s, the odds are minimal that King Arthur would have fancied me for knighthood
and derring-do: the closest I should have come to any Round Table tuck-in would have been circling it with my forelock in one hand and the pudding platter in the other, and God help me if a blob of
custard fell on Launcelot’s coulter. Or perhaps, given my present trade, somersaulting in the grate with titchy brass bells tinkling on my hat, and telling my yawning liege lords the one
about the Roman, the Dane, and the Jute.

However, they have not twigged this in Charleston, South Carolina. Not only do they not realise I am not a gentleman, they firmly believe I am up for knighthood. The they concerned are the
Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, and they have just written to me – on something impressively vellumoid – to say that, after long deliberation, I have been selected as a fit candidate for
ennoblement to their distinguished ranks. They do not say how they came to do this deliberating, but my guess is that since, down the long arches of the years, I have somehow managed to have been
made both an Honorary Colonel in the Confederate Army and an Ensign of the Tennessee Volunteers Overseas, I have somehow, willy-nilly, wormed my way – perhaps, quite literally, as some kind
of virus – on to a Dixieland computer network pledged to embarrassing Europeans of a liberal bent. It is not beyond credibility, either, that one or other of the Bush family has had a sly
hand in all this.

But what is more interesting than the Chevalier’s provenance is their declared motive. They are, they tell me, pledged to the return of chivalry. Nothing new there: the dream of courtoisie
persists, else man would not have so regularly given it a revitalising kick, fleeing into its beguiling arms whenever the prevailing reality grew grisly – Spenser turning to Fairielande from
the mire of the Elizabethan court, Tennyson preferring idyllic Avalon to the mundane practicality of signal box and water closet, and Hollywood running away from virtually everything towards
virtual Sherwoods and Camelots. Given this, you might reasonably guess that what the Charleston Chevaliers – a trifle unsettlingly, my mind’s eye sees them all in sequined flapper drag,
with bobbed hair and bee-sting mouths, dancing frenetically to Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet, but I’ll get over it – want to get away from is the miasma of Iraq, but that is not the
case. What they want to get away from, quite patently, is the ever-worsening threat to all they hold dear (as it were) from feminism. I know this from their enclosed roster meticulously detailing
precisely what I have to commit myself to if I wish to pass the test for knighthood.

In broad, I have to miss no opportunity ‘to make ladies feel like ladies.’ In narrow, this means I have not merely to tip my hat, open doors, pull back chairs, tote dat bag, lif dat
tray, push dat trolley, squeeze dat gas-pump, and light dat fag, and of course manfully refuse any lady her offer to pick up a restaurant tab or bar check. I have also to commit myself, at all
times, to telling women what pretty little things they are, what a really great job they are doing for us menfolk, and, get this, Germaine, ‘striving always to persuade them –
especially those, and they are many, who appear to you to be obsessed with their so-called careers – that marriage and motherhood should be the highest aspiration of every woman in the
world.’

Well, Chevaliers, thanks, you do me great honour, but I fear I am not the timber of which true knights are made. I lack the right stuff. Faced with one of your modern dragons, I would chicken
out. I just couldn’t do the derring.

T
HERE
is a chicken out there with my name on it. I do not know what the chicken’s own name is, I do not even know
where the there is, I know only that in the course of a long life’s wondering about what might one day nip that life in the bud, I had never, until now, reckoned it would be a chicken.

Because the chicken had always been man’s best friend. This was admittedly something of a one-way street, since in order to demonstrate her friendship the chicken had first to give up her
babies for scrambling, then herself to be throttled, plucked, drawn, quartered, roasted, and eaten, finally submitting to the friendliest gesture of all: getting her sucked-clean furcula snapped in
half to grant the luckier of her last two friends a wish. As if that were not enough, the loving bond between man and bird continued beyond the grave: man, praying that mortality might not be the
end, looked at his dear departed’s bones, took stock, and the chicken came back as soup.

But all that is over, now. The worm has turned; and though we may all be shaken that it has suddenly turned so utterly, it’s pretty clear that it was the absence of turned worms that
started it. For once man had worked out that he might benefit even more from the friendship by depriving the chicken not only of wriggling organic tucker but also of fresh air, sunlight and free
range sex, and banging her up in concentration camps to be force fed on a broad range of industrial delicacies to both stimulate her growth and circumscribe her lust, the worm that turned was
unstoppably bound to relocate itself. It became the worm in the bud that is about to be nipped.

Because they come home to roost, chickens. The one with my name on it might be doing so right now, since though it is sunrise here in the West, it is sunset there in the East, and she may well
turn in early because she has this cough, she has this headache, she has this runny beak; probably only a cold, cry the others, there’s a lot of it about, but they are just clucking to keep
their spirits up, they know sure as eggs is eggs that one of their best friends is going to show up any moment now to strangle them all and chuck them on the bonfire. But what if the worm in the
bud is a new mutant strain, and the best friend himself feels a bit under the weather tomorrow? Nothing to worry about, says his wife, putting a caring hand to his thumping brow; but she works on
the desk at Chen Ding Airport and next day the hand is passing a ticket to a happy fellow winging back to Manchester with a nice new contract for this or that, jostling the Ringway crowds as he
hurries home to . . .

Then again, that may not be the chicken with my name on it: mine may be much closer to home, because it is no longer a chicken at all but a tasty nugget of mechanically recovered slurry bulked
up with polyphosphates and cosmetically reconstituted reptile organs from more than one country of origin, pullulating, inside its fetching mahogany scab, with enough hormones to sprout jordans on
a priapic rat, and sloshing about in a zesty sauce made to a secret recipe discovered on Josef Mengele’s Rolodex. Anyone tucking in to a £1.99 jumbo bucket of this muck deserves all he
gets, of course, but none of us is safe: I have walked past my local Colonel Bogey and felt my nostrils clog with bacterial pong. I could keel over any minute.

And if I did, well-wishers would be advised to take great care where they laid me: for were the inhalation not to see me off, the pillow beneath my head might. For, as you’ll have read,
the industrial use of feathers is to be much more rigorously regulated, because unscrupulous merchants and stuffers have been cutting expensive goose down and duck down with cheap chicken down, off
which anything could be caught – probably through the ear, personally one of my least favourite sites for catchable items, since they could be down that hole quicker than the White Rabbit
and, once out of sight, up to God knows what.

So, then, is there anything we can do to lengthen the odds against our being felled, one way or another, by what has clearly become man’s worst enemy? Yes, just possibly, through
alternative therapy – the alternative to lurching into a hospital where the kitchens cook the chicken which any day now will be revealed to be the source of all NHS cross-infection, i.e.
nobody’s fault – because laughter, University of Maryland boffins declared last week, is the best medicine. If you feel anything nasty coming on, a good joke, their research shows, sets
the immune system up a treat.

Provided, of course, it doesn’t involve a chicken crossing a road.

T
HE
worst thing about being a child of the twentieth century is that you end up an adult of the twenty-first. The present
is a foreign country; they do things differently here.

It is time to talk about time. I do not know what time it is, because my watch isn’t working. You will say, hang on, you could look out of the window, you live next door to a church with a
clock, but what you do not know is that the church clock isn’t working, either. Once upon a time, a man with a green baize apron and a bag of spanners would have pedalled up on a squeaky
Rudge, leaned it against the railings, and climbed up to sort things out. But the vicar cannot get a man with a green baize apron, these days, for love nor money; since, when it comes to churches,
both are now in short supply.

Hang further on, you will say, we know you write on a computer, why don’t you just look at the top of the screen where it says the time is 11.06 p.m.? Because the time is not 11.06 p.m. If
it were, the sun wouldn’t be out. Now, while there is probably a way of adjusting a computer clock, I do not know what it is, because computers do not come with manuals any more, the way they
did in the twentieth century, having become so complicated that a manual would be bigger and pricier than the computer. I could fiddle with the keyboard in the hope of getting lucky and finding how
you adjust the clock, but whenever I have fiddled with the keyboard, I have never got lucky, I have only got unlucky, and been forced to take the computer back to where I bought it, usually in the
middle of an article which has vanished for good.

Writing didn’t used to be like that when I was a child of the twentieth century. It is nearly 50 years since I first wrote for money, and I wrote for it with a pencil and paper, which I
could carry around in my trouser pocket and use anywhere. The pencil and paper never went wrong, unless you count a bit of sharpening, but there was always room in my trouser pocket for a penknife,
too. I cannot get my computer into my trouser pocket, and it goes wrong all the time, but editors and publishers do not accept paper any more, and anyway, I have lost the longhand knack.

It is also nearly 50 years since I had a watch that didn’t go wrong. My dad bought it for me when, at 12, I first went off to Scout camp, because he was a caring man and knew that when the
Scoutmaster shouted: ‘Synchronise watches!’ his son would look a prat without something to synchronise. It was a terrific watch: not only could you wind it up every night and discover
it was still telling the right time the next morning; during that night, in the tent, you could read by it. It was the world’s most luminous watch, because little was known about
radioactivity. If Hans Blix had found a watch like that on Saddam Hussein’s bedside table, George W. wouldn’t be in the embarrassing situation he is in today. All in all, I was probably
lucky to have it pinched four years later: the thief’s grandchildren may well have two heads by now.

But it kept perfect time, and never went wrong; unlike the one I replaced it with, using the first money I ever earned with pencil and paper. This was described as an automatic, because you
didn’t have to wind it, all you had to do was shake your wrist every half an hour to stop it stopping. It did not, however, stop people asking what was wrong with your wrist, unless they were
the sensitive kind who reckoned that an adolescent with an incurable tic might prefer not to have attention constantly drawn to it. After a few years, I got sick of all the shaking, especially as
my left forearm was growing stronger than my right – which may explain why my tennis is so lousy – so I got married to allow my new father-in-law to buy me a Bulova Accutron as a
wedding present. It was the first electronic watch, run on a battery which powered a tuning-fork. The first person to ask me: ‘What’s that peculiar humming noise?’ was Mrs Coren.
On our wedding-night.

I had a lot of electric watches after that, always two simultaneously, because when one was sent away for a new battery, it didn’t come back for a month, with a bill to include service,
new crystal, new waterproofing, and a lot of other stuff to enable three figures to be aggregated. That is why I was so happy, last year, to find the world’s first sun-powered watch: no
winding, no battery, just be sure your wrist is regularly exposed to light.

Oh yes, and keep it away from all static electricity sources. They didn’t tell me that when I bought it. They told me yesterday when I rang up to ask why it was on the fritz. ‘Do you
wear it,’ they asked, ‘when using a computer?’

B
OOKS
were always important in my family: I grew up surrounded by them. My mother’s father ran one, her brother ran
one, and her cousin ran one. Not licensed, mind: they were off-course bookies, in an era when, of course, the trade was illicit. You could go down for it. And I did: I went down to The Dog and
Duck, and I stood outside, waiting for men who were old enough to sit inside to come outside and pass me their betting slips, so that I could slip down to this relative or that and slip them the
slips and the legal tender that illegally went with them. I was a runner; and not, at 12, a bad one – when, perhaps because of this early training, I became an even better one, I could be
found running round the Iffley Road track after Jeffrey Archer, possibly the iffiest couple ever to do so: that the entire Thames Valley constabulary wasn’t running after us is down only to
history’s poor sense of timing.