The Spectator Book of Wit, Humour and Mischief (Little, Brown) is just out, launched at a party at the paper’s offices where — wittily, humorously and mischievously — no copies were available. I have now procured one and can report that I laughed a lot when reading it.
In his introduction, the book’s editor, Marcus Berkmann, describes how I appointed him the magazine’s one and only pop critic, a post he was to hold with distinction for 27 years. He alleges that when we first met I was sitting in The Spectator’s then offices in Doughty Street ‘wearing the brightest red corduroys I had ever seen’. ‘If a pair of trousers can ever be said to be intimidating,’ Marcus goes on, ‘these could.’ I am sorry to have given him such a fright, but in fact I have never worn red corduroys, since I actively dislike them (though I did once possess a pair of rust-coloured ones), and anyway I always wore a suit in the office.
I think Marcus must be in the grip of the syndrome in which one projects on to the memory the archetype in one’s head. Thus civil servants must have worn bowler hats, dons mortarboards and Young Fogeys red corduroys. By the same token, pop critics in those days, I suddenly but vividly remember, had spiky green hair and safety pins through their noses.
This is an extract from Charles Moore’s notes, which first appeared in this week’s Spectator.
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