Letter M
If the soup had been as warm as the wine...
And the wine as cold as the fish...
— The fish as young as the maid
— The maid as willing as the hostess
Then it would have been a good meal.
First you get puking and mewling
Then very pissed off with your schooling
Then fucks and then fights
Then judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers — then drooling.
Conquest's take on the Seven ages of Man.
Quoted by Christoper Hitchens in an interview piece, February 2007.
Mother is the dead heart of the family, spending father's earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps and watches the television.
In "The Female Eunuch".
Germaine Greer. What can one say? (Madwoman's underclothes springs to mind!)
All officers have varying measures of clever, stupid, industrious and lazy.
o High staff: clever and industrious
o High command: clever and lazy
o Cannon fodder: stupid and lazy
o Dangerous: stupid and industrious
I wonder if the same applies to managers in industry. Or government officials. Who can say?
At the Ravenscraig picket line last week, the miners were being held back by mounted police. One miner yelled to a policewoman, 'Hey, love, your horse is foaming at the mouth.'
She gazed down at the laughing miner and said coldly, 'I'm not surprised; so would you be if you'd been between my legs for the last two hours.'
As his mates burst out laughing and cheering, the heckler retreated in confusion.
Thatcherism and the miners' strike. Those were the days, heh?
I mean to make some maxims, like Rochefoucauld, and to preserve them. My first is this: After having lived half their lives respectable, many men get tired of honesty, and many women of propriety.
Roll on older age, perhaps.
Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.
Self-stimulation to achieve sexual pleasure and orgasm is so effective and so widespread that one is tempted to ask why we bother with sexual partners ... There are three or four men in Kinsey's sample who relied on self-fellatio, a technique which many men try to use but find anatomically impossible.
In "Human Sexuality and its Problems" [1989].
Dr Bancroft's book is intended for health professionals but there's scarcely a living UK politician who could fail
to benefit from it. Even if they confined themselves to the Introduction.
Marital worries are unknown as far as tapeworms are concerned, for they can produce millions of offspring in complete peace and solitude.
In "Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos".
On an almost related note, I found the above in Paul Dehn's 1956 collection of essays and pieces of
journalistic whimsy For love and money. The essay was called Of lice and men.
Hurricanes are like marriage. It starts off with all that sucking and blowing and at the end you lose your house.
Marital worries in the late Mr Mortimer's profession? It will all blow over...