From my Hide: Shorts and monkeys in parliament
David Holt-Biddle tries on his Christmas present and visits the Indian parliament.
I QUITE unashamedly enjoy getting presents and therefore I look forward to Christmas morning. Our Christmas present buying starts long before the season, with secret ‘things’ ending up in a box on top of the wardrobe in the guest room that is strictly out of bounds, it’s the Christmas Box. In it go all sorts of goodies to be taken out and enjoyed on Christmas morning – obviously I play Father Christmas.
I must digress for a moment. I always get offers of extra employment at this time of the year and always as Father Christmas – my appearance should explain why. I’ve never actually done it, probably because I’m not sure how I’d handle large numbers of youngsters all wanting smart phones and laptops and play stations and things. I have a professional link to Father Christmas too. My first assignment as a cub reporter was to stagger up Eloff Street in Jo’burg with a huge tape recorder in Christmas week to interview all the Father Christmases and the children on their knees in the department stores. It was a tricky start to my career.
But back to last Thursday. One of my Christmas presents was a new set of bathers, rather natty shorts for my frequent summer dips in our rustic cuddle puddle. And this quite naturally brings me around to shorts in general. I found the following on the letters page of an excellent British news magazine I get on an irregular basis. It’s clearly in response to an earlier letter to the editor:
‘To the Daily Telegraph
John Holmes asks how long a gentleman’s shorts should be. In Kenya 50 years ago, they used to say that one could tell where a person came from by looking at the length of his shorts. Knee-length meant he had just come out from Britain; four inches higher and he was from East Africa; mid-thigh and he was from Rhodesia; higher than that and he was from South Africa. Longer than knee length? He must be American.
John Noble, Aberystwyth, Cardiganshire’
I love it. All my shorts, and I wear nothing else all year round, come from a local shorts emporium, including my new bathers I suspect. They start out each day as East African and depending on how often I hitch them up they graduate through Rhodesian to South African. Sometimes if I forget to hitch they become decidedly fresh-out-from-Britain.
And finally some wildlife news, from shorts to monkeys. News is that the Indian government is hiring big monkey impersonators to frighten off the smaller monkeys who have taken to invading Parliament in New Delhi. The smaller monkeys, macaques, have been stealing lunch packs and even government files from bureaucrats, who are fed up with having monkeys in Parliament. They say it’s working, they’re keeping the monkeys out of Parliament.
Finally, may I wish you all a really good New Year. As the Basuthos say, “Khotso! Pula!” – Peace and Rain. Cheers!
Source: The Week: the Best of the British and Foreign Media:
