69 for 1 by Alan Coren

Author:Alan Coren [Coren, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907532528
Publisher: Aurum Press

Time Check

IN all the 31 years, 8 months, 22 days, 13 hours and 27 minutes that I had been writing regularly for The Times, I had never been as gobsmacked by anything in it as I was at 8.12 a.m. on Monday, January 16, 2006, the minute up to which all those other minutes had led. In the interests of precision, I wish I could tell you how many seconds there were on the end of the minutes, but I can’t. That is because, when the minutes began, back in 1974, I did not have an Artex clock. None of us had. We did not know about the Artex clock until Monday morning, at 8.12, when we opened our copies of The Times.

To page 8. Where, beneath two unforgivably sloppy recipes for, on the left, duck salad with tarragon from Thomasina Miers, and, on the right, roast chestnuts from Joanna Weinberg, there was an advertisement from Times Offers Direct which put both these women to professional shame. How Ms Miers will ever hold up her head again after telling her readers to marinate the duck for ‘a minimum of one hour, but preferably three to four’, or Ms Weinberg go out in public after telling hers, even more slaphappily, to roast the chestnuts until ‘one of them pops with a loud bang’, I cannot begin to imagine. The sooner each coughs up £19.95 for an Artex clock to bolt beside her hob, the likelier both are to stave off their leaving parties.

For the Artex clock, according to the rubric which so unprecedentedly gobsmacked me, is ‘guaranteed to be accurate to less than a second in a million years.’ That is one hell of a guarantee. I know it to be an honest one, too, because it carries The Times imprimatur, which means that the most nit-picking lawyers in the world – they have a collection of my own nits which is second to none – have nodded it through. They are confident that if, in 1,000,2005 AD, an owner of an Artex clock bangs on the front door of The Times and demands his money back on the grounds that, after only 999,999 years, his clock is two seconds fast, he will not have a leg to stand on.

If, that is, he has legs at all. He’s a queer cove, your Johnny Evolution, and anything might have happened to Homo sapiens by then. Either that, or global ennucleation will have ensured that the only creature left to survive will, by 1,000,2005, have developed into Cockroach sapiens, who will have a lot of legs and be able to carry several iffy Artex clocks while still having a couple of legs free to bang on the Times door with. Provided, of course, that it is still The Times and not The Daily Cockroach; in which event the management may well disclaim any obligation to honour the guarantee offered by their predecessor in 2006. Should you wish clarification on this point before ringing 0870 789 0716 to order your clock, I suggest you ring The Times’ lawyers.

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