"But I Digress ..." Read Online Free PDF Page B

bravely.
    Gillman, meanwhile, was fumbling for some wackiness. His entire radio career is built upon the twin pillars of being wacky and shouting into the microphone. On television you are not allowed to shout into the microphone. “This mince pie tastes like … tastes like … this!” he mugged, grabbing something from the table in front of him. Unfortunately the camera failed to follow his hand, so we will never know what he grabbed. I suspect, however, it was another mince pie. How Isabel must have wished she was still dealing with swindlers, charlatans and mail-order shysters.
    On Christmas Eve I shunned SABC’s various treasure troves of festive tunes (if it’s not sung by Sacha Distel, I just ain’t interested), and turned instead to the baubly wonders of satellite. Sadly, there was no Christmas Channel – which makes me wonder exactly how the Osmonds make a living these days – but I happily settled down to The Wizard of Oz (TNT Classic Movies, 11pm).
    I have always considered The Wizard to be a far more appropriate Christmas film than those other staples, The Sound of Music (in which Julie Andrews tries to sing the Nazis into submission) and It’s A Wonderful Life (in which Jimmy Stewart demonstrates the socially productive aspects of attempted suicide).
    It is an unsettling film. Things stir beneath the surface of the story – fearful things, only half-apprehended by children, and the more powerful for that. With its witches and flying monkeys and unreasonably cheerful midgets, there is a dark shadow rimming the candy colours and heel-kicking tunes of Oz. It is, I think, the shadow of adulthood, of the farm back in Kansas with its mortgage and its freak tornadoes and failed crops.
    Watching the young Judy Garland, pumped to the pigtails with diet pills and amphetamines, turning her face to the skies and to the future, yearning to be somewhere over the rainbow, I couldn’t stop myself whispering: “Stay right where you are, babe.”

A night with Monica Lewinsky
    SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 14 MARCH 1999
    W HEN I WAS 11 , as cute as a grazed elbow in short pants and haversack, dreaming of growing up to be an ichthyologist or Joe Hardy or, in my more solitary moments, that woman from the Morkels advert, I conceived a fascination for a girl in my class. In fact, we all did, after it became known that Shirley Whiteside had gone all the way with Craig Barnsley, an oafish youth in Standard 5 who, with an unrelated passion, used to waylay me on the way home and make me eat grasshoppers.
    I had only a fuzzy grasp of what going all the way might entail. Surely Shirley didn’t actually swallow the grasshoppers? (I used to stow their chewed-up corpses under my tongue, grinning and mumbling with a studious nonchalance, then covertly spit them out once Barnsley had released the downward pressure on the back of my head. It is a technique that even today serves me well in editorial conferences.)
    Still, Shirley was pretty hot stuff among the boys of Mrs Kincaid’s form class – we speculated endlessly about the events of that hot Durban afternoon beneath the frangipani tree while Mr and Mrs Whiteside were at work. Steven Kenton thought it had happened in the shady ditch behind the woodwork room, but no one ever listened to Steven Kenton.
    Shirley was the focus of a small-boy curiosity of almost unbearable intensity. I would lie awake at night in a restless fever – in the morning the sweat stains on the pillow (if you tilted your head and squinched up your eyes) described the silhouette of Shirley Whiteside. When she played those mysterious games on the playground with the other girls, involving a length of elastic and plenty of squeals, her calves flexed unfathomably and her ponytail shimmied and trembled with the impenetrable secrets of adulthood.
    Happily, I never learnt what went on at the bottom of the Whitesides’ garden. As a result, my imagination prospered,