THE TALL BERT EXECUTIVE

I was leafing idly through the pages of the latest ‘Camping and Caravanning Club’ magazine the other lunchtime, when Newtown St Boswells was nestling under a giant sponge about to be squeezed earthwards by God’s mighty hand. I didn’t fancy going out to be soaked, especially as the highlight of my usual lunchtime stroll, i.e. to walk stealthily around the bowling green undetected by the groundsman, lacked its usual frisson of excitement, because he wasn’t there. I read the magazine almost in desperation, as I had exhausted all other readable matter, including a pamphlet on shredding machines and a tract about risk management and business continuity planning up, down and for all I knew, diagonally across the supply chain. I picked up the magazine. The style of writing was loud, cheery and patronising, as if the publishers thought the target market was the slightly deaf and bewildered on a day’s outing to Margate. There was an introduction by the President, Mr David Bellamy, whose face looks as if it has been used as a fence-post sometime in its youth. He was his usual breezy self, warning of total global annihilation by 2016 if campers failed to pick up all of their litter and take it home with them, or, better still, carry around a composter in their jacket pocket. I was fascinated by the magazine’s clarion call for strangers to meet up in the middle of freezing April in a muddy field somewhere near St Neots, or to attend a turnip-throwing contest in a sanitation-free site in Oakshott (dig your own latrine). I was riveted by news of the latest invention in Porta-Pottis with its revolving blade action, or the new hiker’s tent with poles made out of molybdenum that weighed an ounce and a half and packed itself up after it had been slept in. After a pleasurable twenty minutes, I had exhausted all of the articles and had moved on to the classifieds, always a rich source of entertainment. In the ‘Motor Caravans for sale’ section, I read the following: “For sale - Tall Bert Executive.” I hooted with amusement. Someone in the classified ads section of a major caravan magazine had no idea how he or she should spell or write ‘Talbot Executive.’ Imagine also the distress caused to that keen caravanner and magazine reader , the six-foot-seven inches in his stockinged-feet Mr Albert Trout, Managing Director of a major manufactory of mechanical lubricators in Hay-on-Wye, who had to issue a statement to say that he was not available to be bought, no matter what the advertisement might have said.