Tuesday 5 October 2004

As I was saying to Tom Cruise...

Here’s a picture, taken in Seoul in 1988, of me at a sporting event, explaining some of the finer points of the game to a lady spectator. I won’t say who she was (still is, for that matter), because one thing I really cannot bear is name-dropping.

When Denis Healey was Foreign Secretary he was once taken to task by a fellow MP, who said “Denis, you really are a terrible old name-dropper”. He replied, apologetically, “Yes, I know, that’s exactly what the Queen Mother said to me the other day”.

The neatest dropping I ever heard was done by an elderly Italian lady who had moved in distinguished society all her life. She was telling us at dinner about her love of horses and how when she was eight a family friend gave her as a birthday present her first pair of jodhpurs.

Then it just sort of slipped out that the family friend happened to be the Maharajah of Jodhpur.

2 comments:

Tony said...

Nice to hear from you again, Robin, but don't quite take your point. Vampirism? That seems a bit extreme. Parasitism, perhaps. I'll ask Noam Chomsky next time he comes to dinner.

Marc said...

Those two comments were the funniest thing I've read all day. Thanks for the laugh!