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But the proper pairing for today is one I didn’t join. It was just them. You know why today is a really big day? Because it is Neville Chamberlain’s birthday. If he were alive today
he’d be 134, and people would pay good money to look at him, but when he was 70, what people did was listen to him. And it was on this Ferguson that he told my parents that no such
undertaking had been received and in consequence this country was at war. Which is why I have fettled it. I rather fear it is time to switch it on again.

E
XCITED
by the interview in Monday’s
Times
with H. Cameron Barnes, here from America to promote his
self-help book
Affair!
, thousands of you have written to ask me whether there is similar aid for British adulterers eager to kick over the marital traces without being found out. Alert to
your every need, I have plucked a few forbidden fruit from the Internet . . .

RUBBER BRIDGE. Despite the most meticulous timing and calculations, many men, having slipped from the nuptial sack after the wife has dropped off in mid-headache, find they are
unable to return to it from their little friend’s apartment before dawn breaks. Why not avoid those dangerous crosstown dashes by bridging your absence with the sensational My Old Man? My Old
Man is, when inflated, a full-size husband: you simply slide out of bed, slide My Old Man in, carefully pump him up, stick his head under your pillow, and leave. Should you return after sun-up,
your wife will notice nothing! While she is cooking your breakfast, you can slip back covertly, deflate My Old Man in seconds, and saunter downstairs without a care in the world. Order NOW from PO
Box 18, Tring, only £49.95 (pyjamas not included).

CHERCHEZ LA FEMME. Hot flushes are a common female complaint, often brought on by the question: ‘What did you do today, I tried to ring you?’ Now you can exchange
that blush for a smug smile! Our brilliant RUN OFF MY FEET COMPENDIUM offers women a fabulous range of watertight alibis, including two Tupperware buckets, ten used bingo cards, four plastic bags
(Safeway, Liberty, Ikea, Bergdorf Goodman), six Odeon stubs, three dental appointment notices, two failed MoT certificates, a soiled and numbered marathon vest, a black veil and armband, and a
Cordon Bleu diploma on genuine vellumette with your name embossed in gold!

Ring 083971 66547 for details. No salesman will call, unless you fancy a big Greek plumber with liquid eyes and a skin like watered silk.

DO YOU REQUIRE a full-colour set of professional photographs of your affair, handsomely bound and mailed by us to relatives and friends? If the answer is no, then a cheque for
£1000, popped in the post right this minute, will instantly dissuade our crack team of paparazzi from springing out on you (or in on you) in the small hours. SNAP DECISIONS, 4a, Grole House,
SW9 3HH.

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER – which could well be acutely embarrassing. What you should be after is something that says Thank You My Darling and rots without trace as soon as
possible. For example, why not a psittacosis-riddled macaw? A mere £750, yet it shrieks ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ over and over again for several hours, before dropping
dead. Or perhaps your own effigy in Neapolitan ice-cream, decorated with erotic messages in little silver balls which fall off into illegibility after five minutes at room temperature, only
£50 (hot fudge sauce extra)?

Don’t delay, e-mail today, to [email protected]

FULL MARKS! Nothing is more likely to rock an otherwise sensible, practical, and numbingly boring marriage than the sudden sight, on one partner or the other, of inexplicable
bruises, carpet-burns, toothmarks, weals, or scratches. Now you can make them explicable with a wide range of pills and ointments whose labels clearly state that the bottles contain antidotes for
snakebite, old Turkish remedies for bubonic plague, oral anti-tetanus vaccine for barbed wire wounds, etc. The contents vary from cold cream to Smarties, and start at only £7.95 from Placebo
Domingo Ltd, Suitcase 9, Oxford Street, W1.

NEED A FULL-LENGTH VIDEO of a major Hong Kong sales conference so ineptly shot, wrongly focused, wobbly, and under-exposed as to render all human figures unrecognisable?

Should you require this incontrovertible proof that your spouse was utterly out of order in suspecting you of actually being shacked up in the Bide-a-Wee Motel, Galashiels, during those eight
days, we should be delighted to supply it under plain cover to your nominated post restante. Also available: Desert Rats Reunion, Geneva Motor Show, Highland Games, UKIP Seminar, Solo Transatlantic
Yacht Race, and many more. From £250. WRITE: Who? Me? Films, 8 Pondicherry Crescent, Uxbridge.

I
HAVE
just spent several days looking for a new nose. Do not, however, jump to cruel conclusions about the webhunting of
cosmetic rhinopractors: a glance at my back-flap mugshot, if you can bear it, should quickly tell you that a new nose wouldn’t help; nothing short of a whole head replacement could sort
things out, so until the window-boxes of Harley Street are in a position to offer a full range of fetching transplantables waving on genetically modified sunflower stalks and awaiting the open
chequebooks of the vain, I fear I shall be forced to stick with what Mother Nature delivered to Mother Coren. The new nose I was looking for was not for me, but for Aphrodite.

It had to be a very small nose, mind, for she is a very small Aphrodite. A pocket Venus. She is only three feet tall, though terribly attractive, if you like conkless women, and I picked her up
at a country sale a week ago for a knockdown price, probably because she had at some point in her statuary career been knocked down, leaving her nose where she fell. I do not know where that was,
otherwise I should go round and look for it, even though the likelihood is that the nose is no longer there: it would have been a pretty nose, I imagine, given that its owner is the goddess of
beauty, so someone coming across it, wherever it was that it lay bodiless, would have been bound to pocket it and take it home to put on the mantelpiece. Then again, if all this happened a long
time ago, and the finder were a toff, it might well have ended up on his watch-chain; it would be an interesting talking point, should you run out of things to say about Home Rule or the new
Trollope, and it would make small grandchildren giggle whenever you plucked it out of your waistcoat pocket and swung it.

Anyway, wherever the nose is now, it wasn’t on the little stone coquette I ported home from Wiltshire to put in my garden. Mrs Coren insisted this didn’t matter, distress was part of
its charm, not to mention its mystery, look at the Sphinx, but my view was that a statue designed to celebrate feminine perfection wasn’t doing its job if it appeared to have gone three
rounds with Mike Tyson, and as far as mystery was concerned, I would rather not have people coming into my garden and saying what’s that, why’s it got no nose, does it do riddles?

So I turned, as I invariably do when the chips are down (and this being, for once, quite literally the case) to the
Yellow Pages
, to find, astonishingly, that there was nothing between
non-ferrous metals and notaries. Which drove me and my PC into the hands of Google, Sherlock and Jeeves – who could easily be a firm of notaries but are in fact discrete search engines
– and when I tell you that though between them they came up with umpteen entries for nose, many so extravagantly repellent that I shall never again be able to look into a handkerchief without
fear and trembling, none of them had the faintest idea of where I might get hold of a stone one. Jeeves, to be fair, did shimmer in with long lists of both stonemasons and sculpture restorers, but
it didn’t take many phone calls to discover that no mason was prepared to unsheath his chisel for anything so titchy, and that the only way to get a restorer to give you a nose was to give
him an arm and a leg.

So, yesterday, I decided to build one. I stood Aphrodite on the garden table so that our faces were of a height, I mixed the Polyfilla to the prescribed formula, I pressed the lump to the stump,
and while it was still pliable, I shaped it with care and, yes, love. You will say, that was a tad risky, remember Pygmalion, Mrs Coren would not take kindly to coming out into the garden and
discovering that you had fallen head-over-heels for a Greek midget, but you are wrong; when Mrs Coren came into the garden, what she said was: ‘What is the Duke of Wellington doing on the
table?’ So I tried to tweak a bit off the end of the nose, but it wasn’t pliable any more, it was crumbly, and I had to start again, this time moulding a selection of noses, retrousse,
button, flared, something I’d spotted on Jennifer Lopez, but let me tell you it isn’t easy, you get the nose right and then try to poke nostrils in with a twig and the whole thing
suddenly goes bulbous, you are looking at Sid James, but I managed it, finally, and I carried Aphrodite to a shady spot beneath an apple tree. Where her nose soon dried to – Mrs Coren
helpfully pointed out – a slightly different colour from her head.

‘It’ll weather in’, I said.

But it didn’t. It weathered off. Either that, or a bird stood on it. When we looked out this morning, Aphrodite and her nose were side by side. ‘Not exactly aphrodisiac, is
it?’ I said. ‘Shall I bin it?’ ‘No,’ said Mrs Coren, ‘look on the bright side. It’s a terrific memento mori.’

C
OUNTLESS
workaholic readers with no time for gyms or marathons have e-mailed me following Monday’s mould-breaking
news from applied physiologist Professor Martin Gibala that all a 24/7 nose-grinder needs to achieve tip-top fitness is just two minutes a day using either a cycling machine or a folding bike kept
in the boot of the car. They want to know if this regime really works. It does. I have been there.

Here you are, driving to the office. Too often, busy-busy people like you make the car an excuse for letting up on exercise, but trust me, umpteen opportunities abound for working out that
flabby old body of yours as you drive. First, keep a constant eye open for fitness freaks who have already unfolded their bicycles: they will, as part of their workout, overtake you on the inside,
shoot across you on the red light, cut in without signalling, spit, scream, give you the finger, and bang their fists on your roof. Do not let them outfitness you: jam on your brakes (firming up
ankles), grip the wheel until your fingers go white (shedding unsightly knuckle-fat), scream back even more hysterically (toning up wattle-necks), give them two fingers to their one (strengthening
digital sinew), and bang your own fist on the dashboard (accelerating heart-rate and dislodging dangerous platelets).

Next, try to text your congestion-charge number: 500 rapid press-ups will give you a thumb of iron, and, since you still cannot get through, hurling your cellphone out of the window will boost
wrist-sinew, especially if, in your invaluable cholesterol-thinning rage, you have forgotten to open it, allowing the cellphone to bounce back onto the rear seat, compelling groping and flailing
just great for arms, neck and shoulders.

Nearing your office, be sure to take advantage of the fact that the congestion charge doesn’t work: park a mile away, remove your folding bicycle from the boot, and attempt to put it
together. I have frequently found that throwing a partly assembled folding bicycle into the road and screaming as you jump up and down on it gets the whole body working. You can feel it in your
temples. Now you have broken it, you are in a splendid position to jog – carrying your muscle-building briefcase, lap-top, overcoat, umbrella, and gunny-sack of healthy lunch-time yak-yoghurt
and fibrous growths from more than one country of origin – to the nearest department store, to buy a cycling machine instead.

Once there, and the sweat has dried from pores so healthily opened you can poke a pencil through them, remember to take the lift, NOT the stairs. It’s a mistake so many keep-fit fanatics
make: stairs will strengthen only adipose legs and hips, but a lift which insists on going up when you pressed down, ensures that you are stuck behind three women with pushchairs and a man with a
new garden bench when the doors eventually open at your floor but shut again before you can push through, and may even, with any luck, pack up altogether between floors, will enable you to jump up
and down, wave your arms about, bang on the doors, fall to your knees, open all those lucky pores again, and, most important, get those sluggish lungs and heart of yours working overtime, never
mind toughening your bladder no end.

You will need the lift because, having asked on the ground floor if they sell exercise bikes, you will be directed to the enquiry desk on the top floor, who will advise you try the sports
department in the basement, where everyone will be (a) off sick with RSI, (b) seeing their lawyer about the till which caused it, (c) on maternity leave, or (d) taking a counselling break –
with the sole exception of a Finn brought up in Taiwan, the battery of whose hearing-aid has just gone flat. You will both run around for a while, pulling out croquet sets and fishing rods and
ping-pong bats, until his colleague returns from counselling and, summoning all the English you would expect from a Chinese brought up in Finland, directs you to the fifth floor. Which will turn
out to be Ye Olde Nigella Burger Bar and Staff Infirmary, where a fist-faced matron will send you back to the enquiry desk in the attic.

Great, or what? Having galloped many a mile, shed many a kilo, and fettled everything attached to your skeleton and hanging inside it, don’t you feel fighting fit? Now do something for
someone else: buy the bike and take it to the office, so your mates can see it. Laughter is the best medicine.

L
OUIS
Bleriot; Charles Lindbergh; Douglas Bader; Guy Gibson; the Red Coren. Every generation has one. Welcome aboard, this
is your ace speaking. We shall be flying at 30,000 feet at a speed of 550 mph, just as soon as the kid stops screaming. Until the kid stops screaming, we have no way of knowing if the engines are
working. For your information, the engines on this Boeing 767 are RR RB 211-524Hs. Rolls-Royce are very proud of them: at 550 mph all you can hear is the ticking of the clock. Unless the kid is
screaming. If the kid is screaming, you couldn’t hear Big Ben.