At Knifepoint With Cultural Amnesia

Sorry for the slightly late in the day update, Chipettes. I’ve had to take a day’s rest and force myself to watch a pretty dull FA Cup final. Not that I’m complaining about their being a lack of excitement in the Chipster household. I had enough of that yesterday, which started with me trying to make a five pounds saving and ended at the point of a paperknife.

We’d gone over to Birmingham to see Gabby’s management team who are still working hard to come up with a hit as big as the hokey cokey. We spent the lunch hour browsing the local Borders, which is where I’d intended to buy Clive James’s new book of essays, Cultural Amnesia. I’d had a quick browse through the book, read the opening paragraphs on James’ piece of W.C. Fields, which I thought made it worth the cover price alone, and I was making my way to the counter when Gabby leapt out from the bargain books brandishing a novelty paperknife in the shape of Count Duckula.

‘What that?’ she growled.

‘What what?’ I asked, having quickly hid six hundred pages or more behind my back.

‘What you buy, Chippy?’

‘I buy nothing I said, truthfully, as I tried to slip into the aisle of murder mysteries before I was involved in one myself.

But it was too late. The great Romanian sleuth ran a finger over her waxed moustache, grabbed my wrist, and dragged the book out into the open where everybody could see my profligacy.

‘How much?’ she asked, knife waving around my loins.

‘Twenty pounds… a five pound saving off he cover price,’ my loins replied.

‘You not pay twenty pounds for this,’ she said. ‘You put it back right now.’

I might have reminded her about the copy of my English Auden which she and her cabal of free versifiers has munched their way though yesterday.

‘I won’t put it back you heathen,’ I hissed. ‘I’m buying it. He’s making an excellent case for not being so intellectually dry as to ignore every form of culture.’

‘Culture?’ she spat. ‘We save for holiday to Romania!’

‘Save away,’ I said. ‘I’m buying the Clive James.’

She raised Count Duckula menacingly.

‘Step back,’ she warned. ‘Gabby not allow Chippy to waste our money.’

‘It’s thong money,’ I said.

She stabbed at the book with the opener. ‘How much on Amazon?’

‘That’s not the point…’

‘How much on Amazon?’

‘Twelve pounds,’ I admitted.

‘Then you buy from Amazon or Gabby stick you with paper knife in shape of duck.’

And there she had me. It was a duck. And Clive James’ latest book is indeed twelve pounds on Amazon. But, then, there’s also something in buying a book and walking out with it. It’s never the same when the postman arrives with the Amazon crate.

Yet in favour of Amazon: have they ever tried to slice off your manhood with something made for envelopes? Precisely. And that’s exactly how I imagine a certain cultural critic would have responded to these most trying of times…