69 for 1 by Alan Coren Read Free Book Online

enquiry desk on the top floor, who will advise you try the sports
department in the basement, where everyone will be (a) off sick with RSI, (b) seeing their lawyer about the till which caused it, (c) on maternity leave, or (d) taking a counselling break –
with the sole exception of a Finn brought up in Taiwan, the battery of whose hearing-aid has just gone flat. You will both run around for a while, pulling out croquet sets and fishing rods and
ping-pong bats, until his colleague returns from counselling and, summoning all the English you would expect from a Chinese brought up in Finland, directs you to the fifth floor. Which will turn
out to be Ye Olde Nigella Burger Bar and Staff Infirmary, where a fist-faced matron will send you back to the enquiry desk in the attic.
    Great, or what? Having galloped many a mile, shed many a kilo, and fettled everything attached to your skeleton and hanging inside it, don’t you feel fighting fit? Now do something for
someone else: buy the bike and take it to the office, so your mates can see it. Laughter is the best medicine.

On A Wing And A Prayer
    L OUIS Bleriot; Charles Lindbergh; Douglas Bader; Guy Gibson; the Red Coren. Every generation has one. Welcome aboard, this
is your ace speaking. We shall be flying at 30,000 feet at a speed of 550 mph, just as soon as the kid stops screaming. Until the kid stops screaming, we have no way of knowing if the engines are
working. For your information, the engines on this Boeing 767 are RR RB 211-524Hs. Rolls-Royce are very proud of them: at 550 mph all you can hear is the ticking of the clock. Unless the kid is
screaming. If the kid is screaming, you couldn’t hear Big Ben.
    The kid is across the aisle from me, in an ordinary seat. I am in a very special seat. Not only is it very special, it is also very important. It is what we flying aces call the bulkhead exit
seat. It has more leg room than ordinary economy seats, it has more leg room than club class seats, that is why we flying aces always check in by telephone before we fly, but that is not what makes
it important. What makes it important is that in the event of an emergency, we aces have to do the thing with the big handle that opens the emergency door, and we have to help with the chute; we
have to make sure passengers have removed their high heels, spectacles, and teeth, and, if they have a thing about sharks and do not want to go down the chute, we have to throw them out. If sharks
do turn up, we have to dive in and knock them about. That is why we have to be fit: when we check in, the deskman on the telephone asks us how fit we are. We tell him terrifically fit: like
well-oiled machines – which we intend to be as soon as the booze trolley comes round, that is one of the reasons we need the extra leg room, we want to stretch out and zizz after we have
drunk the trolley – we rattle off our pulse-rate, blood pressure, cholesterol level, body mass index, glucose tolerance, hearing/vision factors, press-ups per day, all that. Fit or what?
    So then, Sunday night, Nice airport, soft damson sunset over the adjacent Med, the Boeing has taxied to its take-off point, the stewardess is about to do the emergency drill, and the kid is
smiling happily beside his, I guess, daddy. He is two years old, and he is an angel: he looks like Millais’ Bubbles. Pears soap wouldn’t melt in his mouth. At this point the stewardess
snaps open the yellow life jacket, slips it on, and sticks the oxygen mask over her face. And the kid goes crazy. No kid ever screamed like it. No adult ever screamed like it. He is only a small
kid, but his body must be made up entirely of tonsil. Never mind not hearing the engines, if the kid doesn’t stop screaming soon the windows will shatter. The tyres will burst. The
electronics will fuse. Alerted fire-tenders and anti-terrorist APCs will come clanging and howling towards us – though we shall, of course, not be able to hear them. The stewardess is