Missing Bertie Wooster

ashokbhatia

Where have all the Berties gone? 
The lilies that toil not, nor do they spin,
They’ve all arisen with the dawn,
To get their three miles running in.

Then holed up all day, in offices or banks,
Won’t join you in a leisurely brunch, 
No afternoon tennis or games or pranks,
Coping with month’s end accounting crunch.

Even dinner is a rushed affair, 
No time for idle chat or chit,
March through the rose garden’s scented air,
To meet the quota of the Fitbit.

One sighs for the Berties of yester-year,
Mentally negligible, but always at hand.
One found their naïveté rather dear,
And could have molded them into something grand!

(The above mentioned composition has been whipped up by Lisa Dianne Brouwer who describes herself thus:

“Lisa cut her milk teeth on P.G. Wodehouse. Literally, in fact, as many of her father, Professor W. Brouwer’s orange and white Penguins…

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A week in the life of a blogger

ashokbhatia

Day 1

It is widely believed that Jeeves was fed a lot of fish in his childhood, thereby making him a brainy cove, with his head bulging at the back. However, all bloggers may not have had the same fortune. Their grey cells often register a protest, refusing to budge, much like Balaam’s Ass.

But there are indeed times when the creative juices are in full flow and an idea pops up!

Day 2

The idea simmers within. Many sub-ideas spring up and fall into the creative cauldron. The blogger often behaves like Angus McAllister, nurturing the Achilleas, the Bignonia Radicans and the Yucca in the Blandings garden, eventually creating a bouquet of exotic ideas, cleverly brought together.

The outcome is a juicy idea which often gives a sleepless night to the blogger who twiddles her thumbs to figure out words and phrases so the key idea gets draped appropriately.

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Wanted: Jeeves and Wooster in Jail

Stiff-upper-lip police authorities world over surely take a jaundiced view of the kind of narratives dished out by P. G. Wodehouse, holding these to be posing a grave danger to the law and order situation in their respective areas of contol. After all, these espouse the merits of pinching not only policemen’s helmets but also umbrellas, silver cow creamers and such other objects which are dear to their owners. Suave gentlemen, in a hurry to impress a young lass waiting for the rain to stop, think nothing of stealing someone’s umbrella and offering it to the party of the other part. Woolly-headed Lords do not shy away from pocketing a scarab from the collection of American millionaires. Aunts who are not gentlemen keep enticing their nephews to steal cats so as to win an upcoming race. Even members of the porcine species get kidnapped. Cooks get charmed into moving to greener pastures so the lining of the stomach of their prospective employers may continue to be in the pink of health. Gutsy young ladies who are bent upon making insurance companies more spiritual by the latter having to cough up large amounts of claims resort to persuading profesional thieves to steal vintage stamp collections owned by their heart throbs.

Given this singular absence of morals and ethics amongst the characters etched out by Plum, it should come as no surprise that his books are not permitted to be stocked in the libraries of our prisons. This is the only way the prisoners can be reformed and the foundations of our civilization can be stopped from quivering uncontrollably.

Here is a rib-tickling post covering an incident which occurred in one of the jails of India earlier this year, wherein a hapless prisoner was summarily denied a book by the Master.

Suresh's Corner

Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage / Minds innocent and quiet take / That for an hermitage. 17th-century English poet Richard Lovelace from his poem To Althea, from Prison.

My heart goes out to the well-known human rights activist, Gautam Navlakha. I shan’t go into the whys and wherefores or the rights and wrongs pertaining to the justification or otherwise of his confinement in a prison in Mumbai, where he is holed up in a high security cell. Let the lawyers and the judges break their heads over matters that go over my head. That is not part of the mandate I have set for myself in setting out to pen this piece. Reports tell us that he is allowed a 30-minute constitutional ‘in the open space’ and must clean his own cell. So far so bad, but it gets worse and this…

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Bertie, Jeeves and the rummy affair of India’s independence

Suresh's Corner

 “I go in for what is known in the trade as ‘light writing’ and those who do that – humourists they are sometimes called – are looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at.” P.G. Wodehouse.

As a diehard fan of the complete works of P.G. Wodehouse, I was idly surfing the net to see what kind of material one might encounter on the Master, apart from the standard Wikipedia synopsis. I was pleasantly surprised to come across a website specially created for followers of arguably the greatest humourist the world of English literature has produced. There are those who would scoff at describing the works of the ‘Master of Farce’ as literature, but I will treat them with the scorn they so richly deserve. Rather than attempting to describe the contents of the website to the lay reader, I felt it might be better to send an email…

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When Bertie entertains thoughts of having children around!

ashokbhatia

Kind of moody the guv’nor had been for some days. Not at all his usual bright self. I had put it down to reaction from a slight attack of influenza which he’d been having: and, of course, I took no notice, just performing my duties as usual, until this evening which I’m talking about, when I brought him his whisky and siphon as was customary and he burst out at me.

“Oh, dash it, Jeeves!” he said, sort of overwrought. “I wish at least you’d put it on another table for a change.”

“Sir?” I said.

“Every night, hang it all,” proceeded the guv’nor, “you come in at exactly the same old time with the same old tray and put it on the same dashed old table. I’m fed up, I tell you. It’s the bally monotony of it that makes it all seem so frightfully bally.”

I confess that…

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The plight of some homemakers

ashokbhatia

Many of our homemakers happen to be depressed these days,

They wish their spouses to refrain from inviting yours truly to their homes;

Lest he behave like a male Laura Pyke, exhorting them to lay off the vitamins,

And while away his own time merely devouring some literary tomes.

 

A lazy bum, he continues to gobble up cookies from the kitchen jar,

Making the Aubrey Upjohn in the family take a jaundiced view of things;

He opens the hatch to guzzle down jugfuls of tea and milk,

Much like Bertie, he gets up very late, anticipating what the morning tray brings.

 

His cooking abilities are limited to boiling milk and eggs,

An apprenticeship under Anatole is what he desperately needs;

Doing the dishes and tidying up the place is not his idea of fun,

Oh, how they wish these could count as some of his chivalrous deeds.

 

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A meeting of the Pittsburgh Millionaires, USA

ashokbhatia

In order to celebrate the 137^th birth anniversary of P G Wodehouse, the Pittsburgh Millionaires decided to meet up on the 14^th of October, 2018. The meeting took place at one of the Panera Cafés in the Oakland area of Pittsburgh, USA.

Lest some of you get an impression that the millionaires foregathered to discuss some trustworthy sources from where one could secure either a cow creamer or a scarab, you would be sadly mistaken. If your ambitions lead you to believe that you could have run into an arts dealer offering The Girl in Blue, the famous Gainsborough miniature, to one of the millionaires present at the gathering, you would be even more off the mark.

Had you been able to make it to the gig, you would have discovered the Pittsburgh Millionaires to be a group of strong and adventurous folks, well endowed and successful…

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Dear Jasper John, Happy Birthday!

ashokbhatia

Allow us to welcome you belatedly to this wonderful world on a special day,

When you turn one and fans in different continents are celebrating Plum;

For this is the day he decided to hand in his dinner pail,

Leaving a rich legacy of joy, should we ever become glum.

Unbeknown to you, you have brought happiness in many lives,

Not only to that of your parents and immediate family members;

But also to the lives of fans suffering from Corona-induced blues,

You brought hope to a sick planet and kept aglow joyful embers.

You dispelled our manner of death-where-is-thy-sting-fullness,

Keeping us safe indoors, devouring the works of the Master;

Reveling in the antics of those who lived almost a century back,

Keeping our sanity intact, building immunity, recovering faster.

In Plumsville, Death is surely not a dreaded phenomenon,

On the contrary, it confers wealth, castles and titles upon heirs;

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The Joys of Reading Wodehouse: Guest Post by Ruby Haider

ashokbhatia

Of all the reading that I have done, I have never ever had so much fun,
Than whilst perusing Wodehouse, Laughing to burst out of my blouse.

That Bertie Wooster is so British, such a jolly good fellow,
Can erupt like a volcano at times, yet is disarmingly mellow,
Ample bosomed Aunt Agatha et al bully him into the ground,
Bertie would be lost if Jeeves, that paragon wasn’t around.

The aunts make mincemeat of Bertie without so much as a by your leave,
If it wasn’t for Jeeves the saviour, we’d weep for Bertie and for him grieve,
The Wooster name would fall into ruin, rust corrode their noble family crest,
Sans Jeeves to keep a vigilant eye and shoo away both aunt and other pest.

Bertie Wooster is so upper class, so stiff upper lip, simply so very English,
He belongs to the right club, yet tormented by…

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Bertie Wooster Needs Your Opinion

ashokbhatia

I wonder if I should endeavor to find a true and worthy soul mate,

Who would join me in facing the harsh slings and arrows of fate.

 

Let me be spared of someone like Madeline who gazes moodily at stars in the sky,

While I yearn for smoked salmon, cheese and wine, or some bacon and egg fry.

 

Honoria Glossop would be prone to slapping the backs of guests with all her might,

Nudging me to perform goofy deeds without any consideration of my own plight.

 

Roberta Wickham would sashay up to the altar with much aplomb,

But each moment spent with her would be like a ticking bomb.

Pauline Stoker would exhort me to swim a mile before breakfast,

And then play five sets of tennis post-lunch, leaving me gasping and aghast.

 

Florence Craye would like to mould me into an intellectual cove,

Being a…

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