World Cup? It's the Hun wot won it!

GIVEN everything those funster punsters in the Murdoch press have done in the past I was actually disappointed they didn’t reprise their 1992 ‘It’s the Sun Wot Won It’ post-election headline by tagging England’s World Cup defeat: ‘It’s the Hun Wot Won It!’
By jingo! No sooner had the bingo balls been plucked from their velvet sack to announce England’s inevitable (and by now traditional) pairing with Germany than normally sane headline writers headed for the bunkers, pulled on their tin hats and plastered page after page with salvo upon salvo of xenophobia.
One has come to expect it from the tabloids (indeed, your own Little Englander has launched many a nationalistic sporting broadside himself) but this time even the posh papers were at it: The Times and Telegraph thundered about “war” and the Independent concocted a convoluted tribute to England’s goalscorer with ‘A Goal from Defoe - Now for the Foe!’ Geddit?
Actually, my favourite piece of pithily pungent propaganda was not aimed at the foe we faced in two world wars but at an ‘old enemy’ of far longer standing. Neither was it written by a paid hack like me; this was the work of that English everyman, the otherwise nameless poet we might call William Wordsmith.
Plastered on the outside wall of a pub in Cambridge were the words: ‘So it’s Germany v. England and the French have gone home . . . ring any bells?’
Racist? Possibly. Insulting? Most certainly. But also honestly, stingingly funny and quintessentially English in a Dad’s Army kind of way.
And the match result? Predictable. Captain Mainwaring’s men would give a whole regiment of Rooneys a run for their money.

MY mate Domino Joe is a man for all seasons. A former landlord, he quit the bar to open a barber’s shop and has never regretted it: a nine-to-five job and the removal of constant exposure to alcohol have improved his dominoes no end.
But while his drinking has dropped off, his quick-thinking business acumen and fast-talking patter have actually improved.
Mike the Treasurer, a long-haired former maths professor who now looks after the village hall books, went to Joe for his two-monthly shearing and happened to sit next to a customer with slightly less hair than a billiard ball.
“How come HE has to pay seven pounds the same as me?” asked Mike. “He’s nearly bald.”
Joe thought for no more than the time it took to cull Mike’s quiff.
“Search fees,” he sniffed.

SO much for the USA’s much-trumpeted embargo on all things Cuban: the Cleggs from Hexham sent holiday postcards from Havana on May 7 which arrived in New York three days later and in Crookham . . . YESTERDAY.
Hasta la vista, baby!

AS storytellers go, my friend John has few equals. Born and bred in the Borders, he eventually worked for the Mirror in London as a rather grand management executive, though a bit before my time.
A bit of a toff, our Mister Benn as we villagers call him – yes, his real name – has a fund of stories from the Sixties and Seventies when he commuted from his Surrey home to the capital.
He vividly recalled an explosion of protest from a fellow rail traveler – bowler hat and pin-stripes, rolled umbrella and a copy of the City’s Pink ’Un in hand – over the delay caused by a train-bound motorist whose Rolls Royce stalled, jamming the car park entrance.
“Damned cheek of the feller!” roared the military type. “Ought to be ashamed of himself.”
Mister Benn was more sympathetic: “I don’t suppose he could help breaking down.”
“Not what I mean at all,” said the bowler hat. “A chap who uses a Rolls for station work is the sort who’d go hacking on a Derby winner!”
First published in The Journal, Newcastle, on July 2, 2010