Azina laid her first egg at 6.40 pm yesterday. Nathalie expects others to follow in the coming days.
In January I mentioned my spat with the late Sir David Tang over Bertie’s cocktail cabinet. Reading back numbers of Wooster Sauce I found it described in June 2014.
The Great Cocktail Cabinet Debate
The whole thing started with David Tang’s ‘Agony Uncle’ column in The Financial Times of March 8. Responding to a reader’s suggestion that the best way to store liquors “would be in a beautiful art deco cocktail cabinet”, Mr Tang noted that for such a cabinet to look right, “it has to stand in a room filled only with art deco furniture, all Jeeves and Woosterish”.
This prompted a letter written by Society member Christopher Bellew, published on March 15:
Sir, David Tang evokes the Wodehousian world of Jeeves and Wooster as being Art Deco and is probably right. However, there would not have been an Art Deco cocktail cabinet at Bertram Wooster’s home in Berkeley Mansions; Jeeves prepared his high octane pick-me-ups in his kitchen and at cocktail time wafted in with a drinks tray to keep his master’s tonsils lubricated. Pip pip.
Mr Tang (sic) replied a month later (April 19):
I didn’t say there was a cocktail cabinet at Bertie’s home. It certainly is true that in the famous television series of Wooster and Jeeves (sic), played by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, there was only a tray for drinks in the drawing room, and Jeeves always prepared his concoctions in the kitchen. Should we rely on one stage interpretation? I was always surprised that the kitchen opened into the drawing room and this must raise suspicion, especially when there was a perfectly good dining room in which he occasionally entertained his aunts. The main point is I’ve not read in Wodehouse any specific mention that there was not a cocktail cabinet in Bertie’s drawing room. As an honourable member of the Wodehouse Society, I stand to be corrected!
And Christopher could not resist a riposte (April 26):
David Tang makes Heavy Weather of my suggestion that at Cocktail Time the drinks did not come from a cocktail cabinet. For a definitive answer I suggest we Ring for Jeeves, hoping that he hasn’t taken French Leave to go shrimping at Herne Bay.
But this was not the end of the matter! Keen-eyed Wodehouseans who noticed the exchange began debating the facts of the case: did Bertie own a cocktail cabinet, or did he not? Two answers came via PGWnet, where Norman Murphy asserted: “When you wanted a drink at Blandings, you rang the bell for Beach. When Bertie wanted a drink, he called Jeeves, so why would he need a cocktail cabinet? . . . From memory, PG had a cocktail cabinet in his house at Remsenburg, so it is possible that, in his last years, he may have mentioned them in his stories. But if such a thing appeared in a Bertie/Jeeves story, I would be more than surprised. That would have been a severe error on PG’s part.”
Meanwhile, Ian Michaud pointed out that in ‘Bertie Changes His Mind’, it is “quite clear that Jeeves prepares the drinks in his lair and then delivers them”:
“Oh, dash it, Jeeves!” he said, manifestly overwrought. “I wish at least you’d put it on another table for a change….every night, dash it all, . . . you come in at exactly the same old time with the same old tray and put it on the same old table. I’m fed up, I tell you. It’s the bally monotony of it that makes it all seem so frightfully bally.”
Bertie’s views change by the end of the story:
“Jeeves,” said Mr. Wooster when I brought him his whisky and siphon one night about a week later, “this is dashed jolly. . . . Cosy and pleasant, you know. I mean looking at the clock and wondering if you’re going to be late with the good old drinks, and then you come with the tray always exactly on time, never a minute late, and shoving it down on the table and biffing off, and the next night coming in and shoving it down and biffing off, and the next night – I mean, gives you a sort of safe, restful feeling. Soothing! That’s the word. Soothing!”
Readers can make up their own minds, but with two learned Wodehouseans voting nay to the cocktail cabinet, we can only say: David Tang, take note!
(Wooster Sauce, June 2014)
For the avoidance of doubt the two learned Wodehousians are Norman Murphy and Ian Michaud. There are videos of Azina laying her first egg on Nathalie’s Facebook page.