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And my own hairdryer? Bought in Oxford a full ten years before Ginette’s grannie dug into her purse, it ran very hot, vital for a full head of hair. But that it now runs barely lukewarm no
longer matters: indeed, as the globe boils up, cooling a hairless dome will be essential in the sultry days ahead.

Now, shall we re-descend to the kitchen? I have something fabulous to show you. These seven toasters give us endless hours of . . .

T
HOSE
of you reading this propped against the teapot – this, not you – may find some of its words obscured by
sticky blobs. That can happen to books. It may, though, not happen for very much longer. The marmalade industry is dying. The future is not bright. It is not orange.

The reason, claimed a spokesperson, is that children no longer like marmalade, and discourage their parents from buying it. Nothing could be further from the truth; but that is where the truth
has been banished, because the spokesperson couldn’t speak it. Had he spoken it, a certain word would have been inescapably involved, and people would have come round to the
spokesperson’s house and sprayed nasty things on it.

For the truth is that children never liked marmalade, but encouraged their parents to buy it. At least, they encouraged them to buy the top-sellers, Robertson’s Golden Shred and Silver
Shred, because of what the jars had on their labels. And here comes the word, albeit in a form designed to appease those who would otherwise reach for their aerosols and run straight round to
The Times
: what the jars had on their labels were g*ll*w*gs. They could be cut out by children who, when they had collected five of them, would send them off to Robertson’s and get
back an enamel g*ll*w*g brooch.

There was a huge variety of enamel g*ll*w*gs. I myself had three: one held a cricket bat, one held a rifle, and one, dear God, actually held a banjo. I was quite young at the time, mind, as
people of my age tended to be 60 years ago, and I pinned all three g*ll*w*gs on my Osidge Primary School blazer lapel, which is what people of my age did. David Collingwood had five, and when the
rest of us saw him coming, we stepped aside. Respect meant something rather different, back then.

But none of us liked marmalade; we just forced it down pluckily, or threw the jars away when our mums weren’t looking, or, like Michael Ibbotson in 4a, shoplifted it from the Co-op, just
for the labels. Robertson’s had struck a gold, and silver, seam. Until, of course, consciousness changed.

I have never fully understood why it did, because the g*ll*w*g was the best-loved stuffed toy ever. It may, I suppose, have been something to do with the last syllable, but you would be wrong to
castigate it as w*g, since the word was invented in 1895 by an American author called Upton, who conflated it from God and pollywog. A pollywog is a tadpole. You know what God is. And together,
they can’t half sell jamjars.

But if, to save moribund marmalade, it is too late to bring the g*ll*w*g back, I see no reason why producers shouldn’t come up with new cross-culturally inclusive alternatives: little
rabbis blowing bagpipes, say, little imams scaling maypoles, little fakirs chucking boomerangs, little popes on tricycles, and whatever else takes this or that sectarian fancy.

There should even be room for little ballerinas waving swastikas.

F
IFTY
years ago this week, I raised my hand to ask Mr Milward if I might be excused, I walked out of the classroom, I put
on my school cap, and I took the 29 bus to my appointment with the most important man in the world. And there he was, sitting in a bottle-green Austin A35. Not in the driving seat, of course,
because that was where I was going to sit; so I did, and I checked the mirror and I started the engine and I drove off behind a flappy L-plate; and when I drove back, half an hour later, the most
important man in the world took off the L-plate and shook my hand.

How literal can a rite of passage get? Nor had it made me merely a man; it had made me a free one, with a free world, palpably, at my feet: bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to have
three pedals was very heaven. I could go anywhere, much of the anywhere at any speed, and no one would know where I or the anywhere was, and when I got to it, I could park anywhere in it, free. And
not only could I drive any old car to do this in, I could drive every old car, there being no MOT test, so I bought a Morris 10/4 much older than I was, not because of pubescent yearning for a
mature partner, but because she was anybody’s for a tenner.

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, eh? Let me turn from my keyboard now, half a century on, and stare at the car below my window. Though she is much younger than I am, and
cost rather more than a tenner, under the window is where she spends 99 per cent of her time. If I drive her half a mile south to buy a paper, it will cost me £8 for congestive affrontery,
plus £50 for not galloping back the further half-mile I had to drive to the only £5 parking meter I could find faster than the three Westminster sprinters who are racing me to her. The
record of all this activity will be held at CCTV House, so that the Chief Constable will know where I have been, and how, and why, and also be able gleefully to pass the DVD on to the Department
for Jailing People Who Fasten Their Seatbelts After Moving Off.

If rage-fuelled incaution makes me drive my £63 newspaper home at 30.1 mph, worse may happen: road humps may dislodge my bridgework, a MET helicopter report me for whizzing past
Regent’s Park mosque in a manner likely to unnerve armed response units secreted in the shrubbery, and a beak fine me £500 and shred my licence. Probably on the day my car is clamped
outside my dentist’s surgery. Or towed away from it.

Do not ask if I ever drive out of London to go and live in a motorway jam, rather ask how happy I am to contribute to the £62 billion required to set up a pay-as-you-go system for the mugs
who do. And since, in my 50 years of driving to the Moon and back, things only ever got worse, how long can it be before just staring at the car below my window brings an ASBO to my mat?

I sometimes wonder whether, if Mr Milward had said in 1957 that I couldn’t be excused, I wouldn’t be a happier man today.

O
H
, really, Secretary of State? Mandarin, you say? Can you say it in Mandarin? Ah. Nevertheless, you, as Education
Education Education Secretary, have cheerily expressed your expectation that, by 2012, when the Chinese athletes arrive at the Olympic Village, lots of Britons will be able to chat with them. Asked
the way to the nearest Nandrilone r Us, our children will be in a position to give detailed directions, without pointing.

Urn. Do you know how many teachers of French there are in Britain? Yes, you do, because I have just phoned your Department, and they know, so I know that you know. There are 23,000. Teachers of
Mandarin? 78. Something of a task ahead, then, if pupils are to drop French in favour of Mandarin: you will have to find 22,922 Mandarin beaks pretty sharpish.

But first things first, because that is the way education works. Of the 200,000 children soon to take GCSE French, do you know how many will end up able to chat to French people in it? 12. Only
an educated guess, I admit – guesswork was my core curriculum – but I spend a lot of time in France, where I see a lot of Britons, most of them middle class and therefore
middle-educated in French, and do you know what I see them doing? Shouting and gesticulating. They are not doing it to pass themselves off as French, they are doing it because they can’t. If
they need something for the weekend, the only word the shopkeeper will recognise is weekend; he will have to rely on sign language to work out what the something is.

I do not know why, when their own language is so complicated, Britons find simpler languages impossible, but has it not struck the Education Secretary that Mandarin might prove a little tricky?
To start with the alphabet, you can’t: there isn’t one. Where you start is with the first of 50 thousand different characters. Since each can be pronounced in four different ways to
articulate four different meanings, we arrive once more at the figure of 200,000: in other words, as it were, if each of the pupils currently struggling to learn French were to learn instead one
different Mandarin word each by 2012 (a big ask, I promise) they would all have to turn up in the Olympic Village if Britain is – how did the Secretary of State put it? – ‘to
raise our game, in order to compete in an increasingly globalised economy.’

To which end he has a further vision, some might say one even more Olympian, of Britons flocking by slow boat to China to buy, to sell, to holiday, to settle, doing it all in fluent Mandarin.
Oo-er. Given that globetrotting Britons never use any accent but their own, even that extraordinary handful who have managed to learn a few Mandarin words will have been unable to master the
requisite ten tones: they will ask the way to the terracotta army, and find themselves ordering double glazing.

Nor is shouting and gesticulating advisable: remember that chap who tried it in Tiananmen Square? They drove a tank over him.

O
H
, look, there is a new Home Office initiative. Unless, by the time this book gets to press, the editors will have
corrected that to New Home Office initiative; since that is what we might well, by tomorrow, have, given the volatility of events in Marsham Street. (Note to any out-of-touch editors: I am not
wrong, Marsham Street is the new address for the old Home Office. The old Home Office moved there last year from Queen Anne’s Gate. They did that following a new initiative which declared
that the old Home Office was sick and tired of genderist puns about the way one of our beloved sovereigns (1707–1714) found herself walking after 22 pregnancies.

And if you think: thank God, that is today’s bit of silliness out of the way, you are mistaken. We have not got to the new New Home Office initiative yet. This is a plan to embed X-ray
cameras into the nation’s lamp-posts to enable your great Home Secretary to clock terrorists who are carrying bombs in their underwear.

Though I have many doubts about how far this plan carries the nation forward, I have none at all about how far it carries me back. When I was a boy, it was impossible to buy a comic which did
not contain an advertisement for X-ray spectacles. It was aimed at boys who hitherto could only dream of having Superman’s X-ray eyes, which they felt to be utterly wasted on Superman,
because he never used them to look at women, this being incompatible with truth, justice, and the American way. For our part, we felt it to be totally compatible with the British way, just to
uncover the truth about women. So we all sent off five-bob postal orders.

What came back were so opaque that not only could you not see things you couldn’t previously see, you couldn’t see things you previously could. Many of my generation still bear the
scars left by pillar boxes. Though not Gerald Finch: he refused to cough up five bob on the grounds that even if the glasses worked, you would only see Brenda Taylor’s bones anyway.

What is clear to me today, however, is that John Reid has been thinking about this for 50 years. I do not know for which minutia of economic history he got his PhD, but it wouldn’t at all
surprise me to learn that it was the commercial structure of the comic book, not only because so many of his policies patently reflect his early reading, but also because you have only to glance at
him to realise that he has modelled himself on Desperate Dan.

That he is growing more desperate with every passing day is surely reflected in the new X-ray initiative. God knows what the Home Office will come up with next, though I recall that the
Seebackoscope, enabling you to spot any terrorists following you, was a snip at half a crown. But, given fully booked cells and the judiciary’s enmity towards Dr Reid, how will terrorists be
punished? Sentenced to a sprinkling of itching powder, probably.

R
EADING
at the weekend that the railings around London Zoo were too low to keep in any animals which escaped from their
cages, I was of course thrilled. Because I immediately conflated this news with thoughts of mink, parakeets, and global warming, to arrive at the exciting conclusion that when, any minute now, the
Zoo’s inmates become outmates, Derwent May’s captivating Nature Notes for The Times will probably read somewhat differently . . .

As the days of spring grow ever balmier, many of you will wake to the unmistakeable sound of your bedroom windows being licked. Slowly drawing back the curtains to avoid startling, you will find
yourself eye to eye with a large head. You will be able to identify the animal by its distinct orange markings and the fact that you sleep on the third floor. It is a giraffe. It will almost
certainly have another giraffe standing beside it, for this is the season when they are searching for somewhere to mate. My advice is to tiptoe downstairs and move the car to a safe place.

Now is the time when, in Tescos all across the land, you may expect to see short ginger customers jumping up and down in the six-items-or-less queues. Orangutans are impatient creatures, who,
should the checkout lady summon a supervisor to query the correct accounting of a bunch of bananas half-eaten en route to the till, may begin throwing trolleys. It is wise not to remonstrate, lest
the customer turn his attention to throwing you.

As the hedgerows commence their lush seasonal burgeoning, be especially cautious when plucking wild flowers therefrom. The sinuous tendril you gently ease aside may well be a black mamba, that
spry little chappie whose clever camouflage is not his only fascinating feature: the venom of one particularly feisty example is recorded as having once accounted for an entire platoon of Gurkhas,
much to the relief of a beleagured Japanese gun crew who had been about to chuck themselves on their own bayonets.