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If we ever accept an invitation to sail anywhere, it will have to come from a seafaring man with one leg we meet in an inn, whose lugger lies straining at its hawser, canvas furled, waiting to
ship us and his parrot round the howling Horn for a few pieces of eight, weevils our only dining experience, rum our only sundown tipple, a concertina our only dance-band, and our only gamble the
outside chance of finding an uncharted island where x marks the spot.

And if our only fellow guests are fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, that’s fine with us.

T
HE
Law Society is right to observe that ‘in our burgeoning blame culture, it is to be expected that some
plaintiffs who become mired in litigation may have only themselves to blame.’ For who could blame the lawyers when, every day, my postbag sags beneath the weight of letters like
this?

Dear Mr Coren:

In June 1994, a tree root from next door’s garden grew through the side of our new polystyrene pond, causing serious subsidence to a gnome. My neighbour refused
compensation, so my solicitor sought counsel’s advice. He recommended I go to court, where the case took nine days, because of a number of what my counsel described as fascinatingly
unforeseeable legal points, several dating back to 1326, and I lost. Costs ran to five figures.

Being short of money, I sought time to pay, and took a second job as a nightwatchman, where I was laid out by a baseball bat. The company sacked me for incompetence, and counsel insisted I sue
for unfair dismissal. At the hearing, evidence was admitted from the trial of the batter, who had been found not guilty on the grounds that I had shouted at him aggressively when he broke the door
down and caused him the emotional distress for which I had been forced to compensate him, so the dismissal was upheld. Costs were given against me. They were also given against me in the case my
solicitor advised me to bring against my other employer, who had dismissed me from my day job on the grounds that I had been off work for two weeks attending a hearing about being unfairly
dismissed from my second job.

Now unemployed, I could not find work due to pains in my batted head. My barrister sought compensation, but this was denied because a previous court had ruled that I had brought the injury on
myself by aggressive shouting. To pay my lawyers’ bills for all this I had to sell my house, but I did not get as much as I hoped because of the legal fees involved, and since my wife did not
fancy living over a chip shop, she sued for divorce.

My lawyers recommended I defend the suit, which I lost, costs awarded to my wife, and as I left the court I tripped on a broken kerb and dislocated my hip. My lawyers instantly initiated a
negligence suit against Westminster Council, who not only won but also successfully counterclaimed for making the kerb worse than it was before.

When my hip repair went wrong, the Medical Defence Union, acting for the surgeon I was advised to sue for negligence, employed three QCs, but I, being bankrupt, had to defend myself. The case
took a month, due to all the hours I spent limping to and fro across the court as witness and counsel, until it was time to cash in my pension fund to pay the MDU costs.

What I want to know is: if I could get a loan from those nice people who advertise on television, would you advise me to sue my lawyers?

N
OW
, viewers, before we go into the commercial break and the final part of this week’s riveting episode of
Lewis
, here is your chance to play Whodunnit? Calls on a landline cost £1. On a mobile, could be anything. Here is tonight’s prize question:

In this episode of
Lewis
, who is in charge of the investigation? Is it: (a) Inspector Lewis (Kevin Whately)? (b) John Lewis (plc)? (c) Joe Louis?

Lines will remain open until Tuesday week. The number to call is . . .

. . . on this morning’s
Today
programme, John Humphrys – the noisy one with a bit of a Welsh accent – was talking to: (a) Margaret Beckett? (b) Mao
Tse-Tung? (c) Rory Bremner?

Ring 0207 580 4468 and ask to be put through to Cash For Questions. You will not be required to hang on for more than 30 minutes. Not many salesmen will call. If you are under ten years old,
take the food out of your mouth before speaking, and . . .

. . . thank you, Sian! Now it’s the moment all you weather-watchers have eagerly been waiting for, as the lines open for
Umbrella or No Umbrella
. Remember, it
could be YOU enjoying a slap-up fish dinner on the Met Office roof with Esther Rantzen if you can correctly answer tonight’s teaser. Did the lovely Sian just forecast: (a) Tsunamis light to
variable? (b) Sunny spells with the possibility of rain from the east later? (c) Meteorite showers? Ring the number on your screens right now. If you have any special dietary requirements, terms
and conditions apply. Remember to put your tick in the Publicity Please box in this week’s
Radio Times
if you wish to be famous, and send it to us, enclosing £5 to cover,
should you win, our registered reply . . .

. . . which just about wraps up another fabulous
Charlotte Church Show
. Except of course for our big-money phone-in competition, Who Said F*** Tonight? Was it:

(a) Nelson Mandela? (b) The Dalai Lama? (c) Everybody?

The number to call is on the bottom of your screens right now. If numbers are not your thing, you are allowed to ask a smart friend to help, although in those circumstances you may be required
to share tonight’s star prize, a month in Bangor and a really big cake, worth almost . . .

. . . may just be time for tonight’s
News Quiz
. Did Huw say that the missiles were heading for (a) Rockall? (b) South Uzeira? (c) London?

Ring the number on your screen, but do please make it sharpish, and here’s a handy clue: if you happen to live in South Uzeira or Rockall, you may well have an outside chance of collecting
tonight’s . . .

T
O
all the thousands of you reading this in plaster, in traction, and in bitter self-reproach, you have my deepest
sympathy. Particularly as you have just come back – or, rather, been brought back – from your first big holiday break of the season. Many of you, indeed, are limping on that break; a
lousy pun, I agree, but I shan’t be deploying any really classy puns today, since the last thing I want is to have you in more stitches than you already are.

I know all this because I have seen the RoSPA report stating that holiday injuries are increasing exponentially year on year, but only partly because people are annually taking ever more
adventurous trips: while it is to be expected that those engaged in whitewater bungee-jumping or carrying an alligator up the north face of the Eiger may encounter a twinge or two, my concern is
for the vast majority of holidaymakers who, according to RoSPA, hurt themselves by taking minor exercise to which they are not accustomed and for which they have not prepared.

Since RoSPA therefore advocates basic pre-holiday training, let me offer a few tips. Pack your case a month before you leave, and practice throwing it into the boot of your car every day, so
that when your Bulgarian mini-jalopy driver turns up to take you to Heathrow and stares at you while you lug your case out, your shoulder will be up to the task of chucking it on top of his filthy
spare wheel. This exercise will also strengthen muscles required later when you have to get your hand-luggage into the overhead locker without cabin crew giggling themselves helpless at the new
dent in your head.

You would also be wise to suss out the route to Heathrow. Several per cent of all holiday cardiac arrests occur when a Bulgarian with a conked-out satnav arrives in Slough at the moment your
plane is passing overhead.

If you do get there on time, remember that you will have to stand on one leg to take your shoe off for the security joker. Practise this at home for as long as it takes, or risk falling against
the thing rolling your jacket through X-ray. Also train yourself to bend, so that, when all your knick-knacks fall out of what has become your full metal jacket and you try to collect them from
under the rolling thing where they have themselves rolled, you can stand up again. Flying is painful enough, without doing it on all fours.

You will find that a few months’ hearty jogging will prepare you for what happens next, because nothing happens next. Much of your flight will be carried out on foot, since not only is
your gate several kilometres away, but,
pace
Omar Khayyam, the moving walkway, having quit, moves not. And do be sure your marathon training was conducted while towing a wheeled bag under
total control: a holiday wound is bad enough when you sustain it, but when someone else sustains it through your culpable ineptitude, an arm and a leg could cost you an arm and a leg. Because
there’s no such thing as a good trip.

O
H
, look at you, snuggled like a dormouse into a wobbling nest of twinkly Hodgson & Burnett wrapping paper torn off all
your lovely presents; your new Smythson’s cream-laid notepad, hand-pulped from sustainable bing-bong trees by Samoan lovelies on your knee (the pad, not the lovelies), your new Gabassori
Maestro fountain-pen fat and fluent in your grateful fingers, writing your Christmas thank-you letters.

What a very good dormouse you are, to be writing so swiftly to all your hugely generous and irreproachably stylish donors! But, look again, is that not a furrow wrinkling your brow as you
struggle to compose a suitable response to your extraordinarily bountiful Aunt Jocasta? You are thinking: Stone me, the last thing I wanted was a bloody Patek Philippe Calatrava! The old dear has
forked out £24,000 for a solid gold albatross; it is not only around my wrist, it is around my neck.

And goose-flesh rises on that neck now, as you suddenly sense that, while you were glancing at your wondrous new watch, someone was glancing at you. You turn your head quickly, just in time to
spot your 12-year-old son retreating from the doorway behind, and you realise that he might well have seen the same advert his Great Aunt Jocasta saw. The kid has clocked the slogan: ‘You
never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.’

Funny beggars, the Swiss: a unique mix of horology and cupidity, which, in Patek Philippe’s Geneva bunker, has hit its apogee; but, typically, without an instant’s reflection on the
human consequences. How truly unsavoury the notion is that everything you own must perforce be a canny investment – do not put your money in rosebuds while ye may, do not come and kiss me,
sweet and twenty, it’s diamonds that are forever. Why not tattoo your Grossanlegerbank account number on your left buttock to enable, should you suddenly clog-pop, your heirs and assigns to
become our new clients as soon as possible?

Oh, look yet again, the next generation has come into the room to ask if he may have a shufti at Daddy’s new watch. Is there a hint of Midwich Cuckoo in his covetous eyes? Do you perhaps
hear the turn of the screw? Could the little chap be calculating which of your less desirable assets he might one day have to flog in order to pay the Chancellor’s £9,600 cut of his
inherited Calatrava? Worse yet, will you ever again be able to stand beside him on a railway platform with the old confidence, or drink the solicitous cocoa he has brought to your bedside, let
alone show him how to load the Holland & Holland 12-bore over-and-under for which you were just about to write and thank your dearest chum at Goldman Sachs?

Think about it, dormouse, right now. There is no present like the time.

D
ID
you see the
Daily Mail
photograph of Ginette Pike? She was drying her hair. Big news? Yes, for the
Mail
: what she was doing it with was a 40-year-old dryer inherited from her grannie. Could be a record, apparently, so the paper invited any readers still using even older domestic
appliances to write in.
The Times
missed out on this big story, but it doesn’t matter:
The Times
doesn’t need readers to write in. It’s got me.

Miss Pyke has opened a can of worms, especially for anyone who got married a good three years before her hairdryer was even a twinkle in her grannie’s eye. I don’t know what she
opened it with, but I bet it wasn’t a 43-year-old wall-mounted electric can opener. Certainly not one that has been wall-remounted six times, as you can see from the Polyfilled holes in the
wall it is mounted on. Mrs Coren and I still use this wedding present, when we want to open a tin which falls
off
the can opener as soon as the tin has been half opened, because, after 43
loyal years, its magnet is poignantly feeble. No matter, we have trained ourselves to catch it as it falls, just an inch or so before it hits the Kenwood food mixer which stand beneath it.

The Kenwood is the same age, and we love it. I know when Mrs Coren is making a cake even when I am working four floors above, because the bowl is dented and the mixing-hook wonky, and I find
that the rhythmic clunking interrupts my work hardly at all. The cakes turn out very well, too. ‘How’s the sponge?’ Mrs Coren will ask. ‘Wonderfully lumpy,’ I reply.
‘Just the way I like it.’

The mixer came, of course, with a blender. We can still get the blender to fit on top of it with only the smallest of hammers. That the stopper which fits almost totally into the lid has to be
held on while the blades are whirling is a great boon: to tell whether any more seasoning is required, you simply lick the soup out of your palm.

And just look at the kitchen telephone. It has a dial. It was in the house when we bought it, and we both cried: ‘Retro!’ as soon as we saw it, for that is the kind of people we are.
We love using it: dialling introduces a soothing deceleration to the hectic times we live in, and the inevitable misdialling with soupy fingers is even better: you meet so many interesting new
people. It is also, of course, attached to the wall by a plaited cord, so cannot be snatched by villains. They would have to pull the whole house after them.