When I was a student a song popular among my colleagues was Away away with rum. It was traditional parody of the temperance movement, with its opposition to anything associated with alcohol. This was carried to ridiculous, but amusing, lengths.
“We never eat biscuits for they contain yeast/ And one crumb of that turns a man to a beast./ Oh can you imagine the utter disgrace/ To be found in the gutter with crumbs on your face.”
“We never eat fruitcake because it has rum/And even one sip turns a man to a bum./Oh can you imagine a sorrier sight/Than a man eating fruitcake until he is tight.”
And so on, and so on. For some strange reason this song came into my head as I was driving back from the Leeds climbing wall today. I think that it had something to do with my own disgrace…. not at the wall, because we were climbing to a respectable standard today, but before I left home this morning.
We are expecting a visit from an architect tomorrow, to advise us about some building work we are contemplating on the house. I needed to get a pocket-folder of papers in preparation for his arrival, but although I searched the house I could not find them anywhere. I went carefully through the place, including the least likely locations, but without any success. Then I had the extreme thought, suggested by the famous Sherlock Holmes dictum. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” So I looked in the filing cabinet where the folder is supposed to live. Of course, it was there!
The disgrace in this lies in the realisation that we have come to take it for granted that we are so disorderly in our affairs that it cannot conceivably be the case that papers are where they are supposed to be. What a terrible indictment! In recompense I swept both the conservatory and the studio before leaving for Leeds.