Something has come up at F.O. A festive tale

It is often one of the surprises for new chaps that, once their name is escribed into the rolls of Harrrington’s, they are immediately appointed to Her Majesty’s Department of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs.  Yes, I know, but the whole thing was started in the reign of Queen Victoria and there is only so much changing of titles the memberships will allow before it becomes restive.

 

The reason for this additional duty and privilege becomes clear in late December every year.  Imagine, if you will, a poor and benighted member.  A year is spent carefully being away at the moment the wife’s ghastly brother comes to visit.  They have managed, through assiduous planning, to be on a wholly different continent when that Aunt who is to conviviality what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Tiny Tots Club, stayed for the Whitsuntide public holiday.  When the call to do duty by an odious cousin went out, they were not to be found wanting or anywhere else for that matter.  Christmas, however, is a festivity of a different kidney.  No excuse can be offered.  Well, almost none.

 

Faced with having to spend quality eating time with some distant niece, who having recently having done her first Religious Instruction class, and will insist of spoiling  the dinner by lecturing you on the fact there were an intermediate number of wise men and not three or having to have all the cheese removed from the house because some member of the clan was once in a tricky situation with some stilton and mere smell of it brings on funny turns, well, who wouldn’t want an excuse to flee to the club.

 

What has this to do with the F.O. I hear you, not unreasonably request.  It is this.  When one is settling down for a sherry in the late morning and dreading what is to come, what better than a sudden summons to London, ‘I am so sorry my dear, separatists in La Massana are playing up again and the Legation in La Valle have called for help’.  I’ve been attached to the Andorran desk for many happy decades you know.  Never has one small principality been so bothered during December as the subjects of the Bishop of Urgell have. 

 

The advantage of the F.O. over the Home Office is that its very name suggests urgency and importance.  Tell Mrs The Hon Sec that the good people of the lower Rom Valley are troubled with floods and she would mutter something about it being the first decent wash they have had in years and hand me the bread sauce jug to put upon the table without delay.  Even if imagination fails you and you can not invent a crisis, merely whispering ‘it is all very hush hush’ clears all opposition to your departure in a way that would not be acceptable when hinting darkly that the people of the Biggleswade Hundred were at a loss because of some natural or civil doom.

 

I mention all this because we are presently graced in the club by two of our brothers in adversity, Metheringham and Scopwick.  The former is currently in talks with our Icelandic allies.  Some believe the whole Cod Wars were his invention to avoid a boating trip with his in-laws.  Scopwick, he has vouchsafed to Mrs Scopwick, is playing the peace maker in a dispute between San Marino and the Republic of Italy over access to the SS72 motorway near the Hotel Main Street.  A situation which may threaten its three-star rating, despite some generous recent reviews.  Both chaps are remarkable in there own way and deserving of some restbite.

 

Metheringham works with what we a now expected to call Information Technology.  I had just got myself behind the idea that there were things called programmes which you weren’t allowed to switch over if the adverts came on when I was told they were Applications – or Apps.  Feels a bit informal to me, like the way the Clerks in my local Building Society insist on using my first name as if I had been formally introduced to them and had encouraged such intimacy.  I’m not even sure my own mother can remember my first name and so how they expect me to respond to it I don’t know.

 

Now, many of us who have a keen interest in History will remember our early days when we absorbed all that was thrown at us.  Ne’er a television programme on the table manners of the Georgian kings or a pamphlet on the somewhat sparse events at a local country pile would be produced but we would consume it avidly.  We were callow, unlearned and hungry for knowledge. Time dulls the palate, especially for the same fayre, slightly repackaged and served with a sauce that promises more than it can deliver.  Here is where Metheringham comes in.  His App will filter any wireless or television programme to ensure you are only watching the new and relevant.

 

The first setting on the thing merely removes the superfluous content; you know the sort of thing, when the presenter repeats everything you had been told before the commercial break on the assumption you are such a lackwit who is so easily distracted by the offer of a life changing yogurt that you will have forgotten the nugget on new information on Iron Age horticulture previously described.  Likewise, all those reels of winsome ducks flying meaningfully across a thunderous sky or whatever else took the cameraman’s eye are removed.  Metheringham reckons he can get some shows down from an overburdened hour to a svelte ten minutes of pertinent facts.

 

It is a fact that the passage of time is not marked, as one used to believe, by solar events or stellar movements but by the arrival of ‘The True Story ofs…..’  Every decade or so some enthused soul will make a documentary about the marital problems of the Tudors or just how splendid the Dunkirk evacuation was. The app will check against your previous history of watching such things and cut out any part of knowledge you have already gleaned and only show new material.  Metheringham claims whole episodes have been consigned to the ‘not needed’ cabinet without even the requirement to even flick through the Radio Times first.

 

The last setting is one which will sift the content and decide if the claims made by the presenters can, in any way, be supported by the evidence.  You know the sort of thing ‘The Princes in the Tower weren’t murdered but ended up running a pie shop in Turnham Green.’  Metheringham claims his app is so effective at weeding out the possible from the patently silly that he hasn’t seen a thing about how Stonehenge was made or who Jack the Ripper was for years.

 

While Metheringham wants to spare us from the old and overused Scopwick is of a counter-nature.  You may remember that he had some limited success in the 1970s with his books ‘The North: It is really rather frightful’ – a collection of anecdotes from his travels away from his native climes.  It was followed by ‘The Midlands: The least said the better’ and was to become a trilogy with something on the East of England when sales, having gone from mediocre to poor, dictated that there was no demand for his work and his career was ended.

 

Well Scopwick has occasionally penned an article here and there in some of our more regional of glossy periodicals and even had a cross word clue accepted by a national daily but nothing has come his way till he had his damascene moment, he had not been dropped for being out of step with the public’s appetite for such things but, he realised, he had been ‘cancelled.’

 

Scopwick assures me that this is his path from rags to riches.  He has pointed out that one of the great truths is that every single generation has an unshakeable belief that their childhood was both tougher and more idyllic than the succeeding ones and that all things are now gone to ruin.  He’s not actually writing any new material, just editing  a little.  He has turned John Caius’ Tudor diatribe about youth into ‘kids today, if they don’t spend the day by the radiator eating pop tarts and doom scrolling they get sick.’  He says it works every time.  His audience doesn’t even notice that they are the people who are getting easily offended by people who are easily offended or read about the youth spending too much time on their phones or their own telecommuniative devices.  He has come to the club to plan a signing tour for his new book ‘You couldn’t write this today.’ I’m sure you all wish him well.