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I realise that woolly liberals among you may argue that there should not be one law for the rich and another for the poor, but I think they are forgetting one little word: insurance. We are
fortunate to live in a culture that with each passing day encourages more and more people to make provision for themselves, and I find it hard to believe that some benevolent company – let
us, for argument’s sake, call it Direct Crime – would not, if my suggestions were adopted, spring selflessly to the nation’s aid.

T
HIS
morning, something dunked onto the doormat which dropped my jaw so far that the rest of me was catapulted back
twenty-odd years to a year made odder than all the rest by an incident itself so odd that, even now, the memory of it, as I type, sends hot droplets coursing down my forehead into my eyes, blurring
the words’ arrival on the screen.

At that time, I was Editor of
Punch
, and my little cadre of wags and I were cobbling together a parody of
The Times
’s great stablemate, some would say unstablemate, the
Sun
. This of course required us to come up with a Page Three Stunna consonant with the spirit of the enterprise, and after some roisterous ferreting around in the dusty stacks of the
Keystone Press Agency, we eventually found, among its ten million photographs, a figure that might have given the stacks their name.

Nor was Miranda just a shape which, chronology permitting, would have put Jordan in the shade – certainly if Miss Price were sitting at Miranda’s feet with the sun behind them
– but also a face: from beneath a demonstrably undeserved halo of platinum hair, cornflower eyes twinkled lasciviously above a pouting moue glossed to the size and lusciousness of a glazed
doughnut. More yet: there was something else about Miranda which outflanked even all this desirability, and made it, for our purposes, utterly irresistable. Within seconds, we had whisked the
snapshot across Fleet Street into our editorial bunker, gummed it to our layout, and, cackling, sped it to the printers.

Some two weeks later, I received a Telex from the captain of a destroyer bobbing in the Persian Gulf. I shall name neither him nor his ship, given that it may well have been bobbing more than
standing orders required, thanks to the fact that the crew had recently received their copy of
Punch
, and fallen head over heels (this being how it is with hammocks), for Miranda. One
copy, however, was not enough: could I, the skipper begged, send a further few dozen, for pinning up, which he would personally subsidise?

Well done, I hear you cry: not only did you pull off both an editorial and a commercial coup, you did your bit for the serving man. You made Jolly Jack Tar a little jollier. At a stroke. You cry
this because you do not know, just as the crew of HMS
Nameless
did not know, what I knew – that Miranda was a bloke. Miranda was a drag queen: this was the something else which had
tickled our callow editorial fancy. So I didn’t reply to the Telex. How could I? I dared neither reveal the truth, nor supply further copies of the lie (though one or two of my staff
suggested I do both, on the grounds that not all the sailors love a nice girl). Instead, I tried to forget about it; and succeeded. Until just now, when onto the mat fell the thing that jogged the
memory.

It was a book:
Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel
, by Darwin Porter, about which the publisher wants me to say something nice. Not easy. For, as I flipped its pages, I spotted the name
of Clark Gable, and stayed the thumb: had he, I wondered, been in one of Hughes’s films? No: he had been in one of Hughes’s beds. Not content, as many would have been, with Ginger
Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and all the rest, Howard had pulled Clark.

I cannot be alone in thinking Ms Porter has done the world something of a disservice. Oh, sure, we are all men of that world, and, no less to the point, women of it, too, and have taken on board
the twinnings of Laurence Olivier and Danny Kaye, or even, albeit with perhaps a slightly sharper gasp, Errol Flynn and Randolph Scott; but Clark Gable, seminal benchmark of so many hitherto
immortally romantic films? Shall any of us ever again be able to watch Rhett Butler hurtling up that staircase without – even if for only a nanosecond – imagining not Vivien Leigh
panting in his manly arms, but the barmy old aviator, while the great four-poster above awaits the passionate commingling of their two moustaches?

Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams. I give not a fig for their private lives, but their public lives are mine. Who, after this, can begin to guess what other couplings lurk in what
other woodsheds, trembling at the footfall of a coffin-chaser with a trick to turn? Jimmy Cagney and Spencer Tracy, perhaps? Lee Marvin and Karl Maiden? Yes, you are not wrong, it is a dinner-party
game, now, and we shall never be free of it.

Still, it has at least, and at last, freed me of one ancient burden. I know now that I was right, all those years ago, not to write to HMS
Nameless
and set her, as it were,
straight.

A
S
a colonel in the Confederate Air Force and the proud father of a pelican, I spent a somewhat fraught Bank Holiday
Monday. It would, mind, have been even more fraught had the banks not been on holiday: the constant terror that a man in full dress uniform might at any minute turn up at a branch of Lloyds TSB,
one hand holding a pelican’s leash and the other withdrawing all the money advanced for a book I haven’t yet written, would have distracted me from the work in hand, with unfathomable
consequences. I was also fortunate that the work in hand had prevented me from joining the holiday jams lurching towards coast and garden centre: had I done that, I might well have returned to find
my house owner-occupied by a family from Nuneaton, possibly Tring, whose Doberman – since they hadn’t had time to change the locks – would, as I stepped into the hall, have eaten
my arm.

Do you have, as Rolf Harris might put it, any inkling yet of what that work in hand is? I say Rolf Harris, but who knows, he could be any bearded joker with three legs and a wet palette
currently whooping it up in Acapulco on purloined didgeridoo royalties, having had his original committed to a bin on the signature of three psychiatrists who had never signed any such thing.

Yes, you have it now: the issue is identity-theft, and the work in hand was shredding. I had held off buying a shredder for some time, partly because I didn’t want to acknowledge that I
now inhabited a world in which it had become necessary, partly because I didn’t want to lose any fingers, but I finally succumbed last week to the incessant television hectoring by Alistair
McGowan that if anything ended up in my dustbin but grass-cuttings, then hundreds of globally-strewn cyberclones would soon be driving Ferraris and gargling Petrus and bedding celebrity ladyboys
until the bailiffs stove my door in to distrain upon everything I owned and, discovering I no longer owned it, bunged me into Belmarsh.

Monday started off prudently enough, bank statements, utilities bills, VAT-bumf, council tax demands, credit-card counterfoils and all the other dull bourgeois detritus humming into chaff
through the chomping blades, but after it had gone, I realised I had barely started. There was so much of me left on paper: I could front up for the Lord’s Test only to find myself barred
from the pavilion for impersonating me, I could be told by the chemist that my prescription had already been filled and I should henceforth have to stay the Reaper with bladderwort and joss, my car
could wind up ferrying Armalites through the Bogside until Special Branch megaphones hove to outside my house informing me that I had three minutes to come out with my hands up, and if I did not
shred the cherished adoption certificate, some base Tichborne claimant might appear at the London Zoo and tell my pelican that he was its real father. They’re gullible birds. As for my
Confederate Air Force colonelcy, bestowed in 1987 for wag services rendered in Atlanta, if the accreditation fell into the wrong hands and my doppelganger got up in a plane and fired on Fort
Sumter, I would be blamed for starting Civil War Two. Being made, as the result, a colonel in Al Qaida would be scant consolation.

Trickier yet, as I shredded I listened to my radio – if it is my radio, it may well be licensed to a Mallorcan by now – and therefore to a lot of hysterical gargle about the French
referendum. Since one of the constituents of the ex-constitution, I gather, was the eurowide strengthening of privacy protection, the landmark
Non
may well act as a carte blanche for the
hitherto hesitant. What, for example, is to stop a Pole from poaching my membership of the P. G. Wodehouse Society, spending a week at the Paris Ritz in spats and a monocle as Gussie
Fink-Nottleski, and charging the whole thing to my account? And God knows how many points are, as I write, being totted up on my driving licence by Maltese joy-riders.

Indeed, it has just occurred to me that you may not be reading what I’m writing at all, unless you are an Eskimo, given that it is being hacked out on a computer prior to e-mailing and
therefore highly vulnerable to turning up in tomorrow’s
Inuit Morning Advertiser
, since the shredder and I were unable to find the Post-It on which I scribbled my password in 1997.
Some years back, it either blew off the printer when the daily opened a window to let the smoke out, or someone nicked it. I hadn’t thought about it, until now.

Nor had I thought about ID cards. These will be dropping onto our mats any minute, once we have collectively forked out 18 billion pounds, and I shall snatch mine up immediately. No time must be
lost in shredding it.

I
T
being humid this morning and my attic window open, I can hear – though he is buried far away – my
grandfather turning in his grave.

Not so odd, you reply, we live in plummeting times, there is much to spin Britain’s buried grandpas: were you to stroll through Stoke Poges churchyard today, the lowing of the winding herd
would be drowned by the racket of grumpy dead men. You have a point – but not this one: for my grandfather took life as it came (took it, indeed, as it went) without complaint at its decline.
You would not have caught him staring glumly out of his Wembley window and observing that it is not now as it hath been of yore.

Even in 1943. Or, rather, especially in 1943. Because my grandfather knew not only what he was fighting for, but also that his country was as equal to that fight as she had ever been. I say
fighting, but since he was the exact age I am now, he was armed only with an ARP warden’s helmet and a stirrup pump; he knew, in short, what he was fire-watching for. You could tell that from
the helmet: black (so that the Luftwaffe wouldn’t spot his moonlit silver hair), it had two brief messages daubed on it in white. One read ‘Dig here for Dave!’, the other
‘God save the King!’ In the event of his being buried by rubble, my grandfather wanted the world to know both who had died with his gumboots on, and what he had died for.

But the world wouldn’t need to be told that, if, like me, it had shared his breakfast every day. When he came in from his night’s watching, his plate would be ready in front of him,
and in front of it would be three bottles: HP brown sauce, Lea & Perrins’ Worcester sauce, and Camp coffee; but the bottle which wasn’t there was as telling as those which were. His
ritual was unvaried: I would sit opposite him, jaws glued together by my grandmother’s porridge, and he would tap the bottles with his eggy knife and remind me that all were supplied by
appointment to His Majesty King George VI. More yet, he would bang on, HP sauce was named for the Houses of Parliament: you can see that from the picture of Big Ben on the label. So not only our
gracious King and Queen, he would explain, were smacking the bottom of their sauce bottles at the exact same moment as their loyal subjects, so were all our great, and democratically elected,
leaders. God knows what bloody Hitler and bloody Tojo are sloshing on their breakfasts this morning, was his invariable coda, but you can be bloody sure it isn’t this.

Don’t swear, my grandmother would say, he’s only five, but he would ignore her, because there was one more very important point he was already making about HP sauce: it had been
invented in 1899, at the start of the Boer War, so that the soldiers of the queen would have something to help bully beef go down. And if you want to know what a soldier of the queen looked like,
he would add – not without a justified grin at his polyglot segue – have a shufti at the coffee. I did not have to ask what a shufti was: he had explained it on umpteen similar
occasions when passing me the Camp coffee bottle, because the label showed a kilted Indian Army subaltern being served a silver-plattered cup by an egregiously devoted Sikh batman.

That my grandfather saw British history in exclusively gustatory terms would finally be confirmed with the splash of Lea & Perrins onto the bread he used to wipe his plate: he would observe,
yet again, that the bloody Yanks could not pronounce Worcester. He was no fan of the Americans: he had waited three grisly years for them to join him in the Flanders mud, and well-nigh as long this
time around; and therein lies the significance of the bottle that wasn’t there. He wouldn’t have Heinz ketchup in the house. Not only was it American, the American who invented it, in
1885, had been born German. That my grandfather never pointed out that 1885 was the year Gordon was killed at Khartoum, where were the bloody Yanks that time, need you bloody ask, has often, down
the long arches of the years, puzzled me.

Reader, you’ve been very patient: you have waited so long, without once interrupting me to ask why my grandfather is turning in his grave today. He is doing it because today it was
announced that Heinz was taking over both HP and Lea & Perrins. Even as I write, I hear his voice cursing the fact that, henceforth, Worcester is forever doomed to have three bloody
syllables.