In every Friday's Guardian I turn to the page-long column written by Alexander Chancellor. It's the most ridiculous thing I get to read all week. I keep meaning to write summaries of it for this blog, because it is full of tremendous wisdom and insight - for example, that the best pizza chain in Britain is Pizza Express, or that most British people ("just as I would have suspected") don't like cooking, proven by a recently published top-five of shopping list items that included bacon, milk and cereal. (The "overall picture is pretty clear," he announces, forgetting that bacon needs cooking, and that even Jamie Oliver's kids probably get through vats of milk and cereal every week.)
He is confused when the (Catholic) Chilean miners thank God for their release; confused about who to vote for in the General Election (he hopes to meet someone at the polling station that day who might persuade him one way or the other); confused last April when every paper ran a hoax story for April Fool's Day ("I still don't know how much was true and how much false in today's Guardian"). He finds it "hard to warm" to the London 2012 Olympics mascots, hard to understand why over-70s aren't called up for jury duty, and hard to fathom why the Milibrand brothers hug in public ("In Mafia families, brothers carry on like that only when one of them is about to murder the other.").Wise words.
My favourite recent column was about the royal engagement. For a long time AC "dreaded the prospect" of a marriage between Prince William and Kate Middleton, and feared "it would mean the end of the monarchy." But now he thinks differently. Her voice is "pleasant ... neither too posh nor too affectedly proletarian." So it "now seems quite obvious that royal princes should only look for brides among the middle class."
This Friday's was a corker. Most of the columns are three unrelated items, and this was no exception. The first item was about the London Olympics, a recurring obsession. The second was about Dame Eileen Atkins, who has criticised young actors for retaining their regional accents. (AC agrees: it "seems sensible that the default position for an actor should be what used to be known as a BBC accent."). The third is about the aspirin and the cigarette which are, he declares, "very close to perfection in the performance of their respective roles." The best part is section one, I think, when AC expresses his outrage that "the first language of the London Olympics is to be French, taking precedence over English in all the Olympic announcements." What a shock! AC is at a loss to explain it. "I read in the papers that French is 'the first tongue of the IOC,'," he tells us. Apparently he has never watched an Olympic Games EVER. I guess he just never noticed that when announcements were made at the Sydney Olympics, or the Atlanta Olympics, or the Los Angeles Olympics, that they were made first in French. "I suppose it is possible that not every member of the IOC speaks English," he concludes irrelevantly, as though they all vote each time on the language of announcements for that particular Olympics.
You can read the columns each week on the Guardian site, along with the insane comments from people who've stumbled in from the Daily Mail by mistake, but I'll try to update here as well. It's all gold.
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