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September 2009:

I have just been told a terrifying story that I am breathless to relate to my Sunday audience. It concerns the fortunes of one General Rupert Roberts a much revered character around the senior reading room at the club (the home of homes). He is a recently single man now in his late seventies, who after five wives producing a progeny of nine children, has asked Susan Slip-Stream at just forty-five ( a wonderful clubwoman) to be his next wife! With the real shocker that she said yes! However before the General could take possession of said Susan, the bride-to-be insisted that the old soldier have a vasectomy.
After staring at her hard for a moment or two to see if there was possibly a flicker of irony to her demeanor,he nervously nodded before fainting. You see Susan was conscious of the general’s ability to impregnate by virtually shaking his trousers as his last child had just turned ten and he remained a notably hearty man. She was also aware that his off-spring had gone awry so that all were bitter and disappointed failures living from the proceeds of numerous trust funds, including his eldest the fifty-nine year old Claude. He alone is a frightful advertisement for future children as far as Susan is concerned, for he smells frousty with appalling eating habits.
When Rupert arrived at the specialist he was immediately put at ease by the charming receptionist who produced a cup of tea and a biscuit to quieten his nerves. Just as he was getting to the good part in a magazine concerning geriatric fertility, he was gently called to the inner office into which he went with an open and curious mind.
Now the majority of us have accepted the new role of women in a man’s life i.e. anything, but it is not out of the realm of expectation that General Rupert Roberts would have looked forward to a MALE doctor at this difficult juncture. What gazed at him fishily was a sort of female version of a long-ago Sergeant-Major who had frightened him horribly as young cadet. He quailed and said “Er”, but she had no time for gossip and ordered him to drop his trousers as she had many patients to see. This he did whilst avoiding eye contact. She pulled up a chair and tore off his regimental underwear and eyed his boy-zone or as he put it, his “meat and two veg”, as if they must be kept after school for disappointing grades. The General naturally moved slightly away under this sort of scrutiny at which point the pink Dr. Jeckle took hold of one of the unsuspecting “veg” and stuck a needle in it.
Now we have all suffered the shock of surprise in our long lives and none more than our friend the general , but steady on, a needle down there! The very bad news that now dawned on the wounded mem was that he had two “veg” which meant there would be a second act. As a direct result of this almost criminal outrage the other veg legged it into the lettuce as it were, which brought a look of menace running along the doctor’s heavy brow followed closely in an almost dead heat by determination. This was a woman that was not to trifled with, and as the “meat” had long ago slinked from the field of battle it did not take her long to locate the trembling twin.
Now there is not much a chap can do under these dire circs other than to become bug-eyed , and watch the unimaginable, happen, and so it did, again.
As he sits across from me now at the club perched on a rubber doughnut, he does not yet know that Susan has called off the wedding due to the age difference but not steeled herself to tell him. Oh dear.
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Oh Lord, Reggie has returned. I am not sure loyal readers will remember my wife’s brother, Reginald Pull-Over. A greater blot on the escutcheon is almost unthinkable, but there he was, sitting in our living room, grinning inanely at me.

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“The club hides behind the veneer of a Victorian graveyard, only looks twice as dead.” A visiting American friend once described us that way, and I would not disagree.

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I know this is perhaps not the place to say anything about club women, but dash it all, they do try my patience. For instance, most mornings I come into the club’s senior reading room accompanied by my eager mind and still-full lips. I nod to a few raised heads acknowledging my arrival, then plunge into the waiting newspapers from around the world that the club flunkies have laid out on the large wooden table that dominates the room.

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