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Miles Kington - How Shall I Tell the Dog?: And Other Final Musings

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Book:
How Shall I Tell the Dog?: And Other Final Musings
Author:
Miles Kington
Publisher:
HarperCollins
Genre:
Books / Art
Year:
2009
Rating:
3 / 5
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How Shall I Tell the Dog?: And Other Final Musings: summary, description and annotation

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In this hilarious and moving book, popular English humorist Miles Kington faces cancer and death with his sparkling trademark wit, musing on everything from board games and yodeling to the prospect of being outlived by his dog.

When some people are told they have only a few months to live, they might travel around the world or write their memoirs or put their affairs in order. When it happened at the age of 66 to Miles Kington-one of Englands best-loved humorists-he did what he did best, offering sharp, wry, laugh-out-loud observations and ideas about his situation. Following his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, Kington proposes crazier and crazier ideas for his next book (what he calls cashing in on cancer) in a series of letters to his literary agent, Gill.

And what sort of things capture Kingtons attention in his waning months? The sudden grimness of those 1,000 Places to See Before You Die books, for example. (What about 100 Things to Do Before You Die, Without Leaving Home?, he suggests. Instead of bungee jumping and whitewater rafting, learn to whistle with two fingers in your mouth, yodel, or steam open envelopes.) The irony that his dog, Berry, will probably outlive him, or the semi-outrageous idea of creating a funeral video:

The answer is quite simple.

Make a video in advance of my farewell speech, to be shown on a monitor, from the pulpit, or on a screen behind the stage, or wherever the best place would be.

I have already visualised the opening shot.

It is of me, smiling ruefully, and saying to camera: Hello. Im sorry I couldnt be here in person with you today.

Mischievous and utterly original, Miles Kingtons words in the face of death are memorable and surprisingly uplifting.

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Table of Contents

For Sophie, Tom, Isabel and Adam

Facing the Mountain

Dear Gill,

You asked me the other day if I had any ideas for books that I wanted to write, so I am writing back to you now to remind you that that was the first question you ever asked me when we first met nearly thirty years ago.

Actually, it wasnt quite the first question. The first question and I cannot remember who asked it, you or me was What on earth are we doing here? That was because we were both guests at a Private Eye lunch at the Coach and Horses, in the upstairs room where all the hacks met once or twice a month to swap gossip about other hacks.

I think I know what I was doing there. I had been on the staff of Punch for fifteen years and had just resigned to go freelance. Punch and Private Eye were great rivals in those days, and although their cartoonists moved easily from one magazine to the other, there was no overlap of writers at all. If you wrote for Punch, you never wrote for Private Eye, and vice versa.

And within a month of leaving Punch, I was invited to a Private Eye lunch. I dont think for a moment I was being asked to contribute to Private Eye, which indeed I never have been. It was more like being welcomed across the Berlin Wall. I had defected from Punch, and the free world was giving me a free lunch. And all I can remember about it now was sitting next to you, and you not being at all sure what you were doing there, and you saying Well, if youre going freelance, have you any ideas for books you want to write?

I did, as a matter of fact. (I think all freelance writers have stacks of unwritten books at the back of their minds, mostly impracticable and almost all destined never to be written.) And the one I was keenest to tell you about was my World Atlas of Prejudice.

This was a project for a global guide which would tell you immediately just what everyone in the world thought about everyone else. Well, not everyone. What the Austrians think about the Australians is of little interest to anyone, and people in Siberia never tell jokes about people in Patagonia.

And you dont really need a book to tell you what the French and the English think of each other, or the Irish and the English. Or the Americans and Canadians. Or the Australians and New Zealanders. We always tend to know what close neighbours think of each other. But as soon as it becomes a bit remote even a tiny bit remote we are floundering. What do the French think of the Spaniards? Do they have a pet name for each other, the way we call the French frogs or Germans krauts? The Italians and Spaniards what do they think of each other? What do the Italians think of French driving? Are the British the only people in the world who think that the Germans get up at dawn to put their bathing towels on good bits of the poolside?

My book would explain all this.

I once read a book by Alistair Horne about South America in which he told a Chilean joke.

It went like this.

A group of Chilean men are drinking in a bar and one says suddenly, What would you do if you came home early one day and found your wife in bed with another man? One of the other men says immediately, I would go out and break every window in the US Embassy!

End of story.

Alistair Horne then explains the joke. The power of the USA is so all-pervasive in South America that they get the blame (and sometimes credit) for absolutely everything.

Now, you cant really laugh at a joke after it has been explained to you, but you can see why it is funny to other people, and that joke from Chile the only Chilean joke I have ever heard suddenly explained to me the love hate relationship of the Latino and the gringo in a way I had never seen before.

I think I told you all this, and you thought it was a terrific idea for a book and asked me to write down a rsum of it, and I did, and you sold the idea to a publisher for a lot of money!

How I never wrote the book and how eventually we had to pay all the advance back is another story, but at least it proved that I could have good ideas for books. And you have been my agent ever since, and I am still trying to think of good ideas for books for you!

Love,

Miles

Dear Gill,

About a year ago, I said I wanted to do another book. That is, I was going to write it and you were going to sell it.

Fine, you said. What kind of book?

A bestseller, I said. Something that will be so funny that everyone will buy it, even when it isnt Christmas, and which will bring back dignity to the Humour shelves in bookshops, which are presently occupied by miserable things called Is It Me, Or Is Everywhere A Crap Town? or Why Are Penguins Camouflaged Like That, When There Arent Any Head Waiters In The Antarctic?

Fine, you said. Got any ideas?

One thing at a time, I said. First I get the urge to write the book. Which I have already got! Then later I get the idea for the book.

Fine, you said. Let me know when you have got a good idea for a book.

Well, I think I have now got a good idea for a book.

Which, oddly enough, was not one I thought of, but was given to me by a doctor, quite by accident.

As you know, I went into hospital last spring to have my liver looked at, because blood tests showed that my liver was misbehaving. Almost immediately they discovered the reason. I had contracted an unusual genetic disease called haemachromatosis, which makes it difficult for the body to absorb iron, so my bloodstream had become abnormally high in iron content.

(This might explain why I was being so often stopped by security people in airports. Even after I had emptied all my pockets and taken off all my metal accessories, I was still setting off the alarm when I went through the metal detector again. They could never find any reason for it. But it may have been the high metal content of my blood at least, so I claimed in a piece I wrote about it at the time.)

Haemachromatosis is no big deal and can be cleared up by a programme of blood-letting. (Every time you lose the blood, the body makes some more, and the new blood is all iron-free.) But they then spotted some trouble in my bile duct and decided to insert a plastic pipe to open up a small blockage. Then they decided to take out my gall bladder. When they did that, they spotted some irregularities in my liver and pancreas, and decided to take some samples, and it was after looking closely at those that they decided I had got cancer. Nosey parkers.

Cancer of the pancreas, it was. This was unfortunate, because, as a doctor friend of mine said to me, Thats not one of the nice ones. Not much research work has been done on it, you cant operate on it, and even chemotherapy does little more than arrest the process.

So, at the age of sixty-six, I suddenly found that my expected life span of another twenty years at least had shrunk dramatically.

The surgeon who had operated on me was surprisingly upbeat.

Dont think of yourself as dying, he said. We are all dying anyway. Just think that you now know what you are going to die of. Up to now, it might have been a heart attack, or a stroke. But now were pretty sure its going to be cancer. Though not for ages, yet. With luck.

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