In Praise of Savagery by Warwick Cairns

wearing the most ostentatious costume in the room, a costume which said—depending on your point of view—‘progressive, modern reformer’, or ‘dour, miserable killjoy puritan’, or else, in the words of the journalist Simon Heffer, ‘simply bloody rude’.
    In the town where I now live, my wife and I once saw a party of schoolgirls looking very smart and striking, all dressed in long scarlet cloaks and wearing broad straw hats. A few years later, we took our eldest daughter, Alice—ten years old at the time—to the school to be interviewed by the headmistress, who had taken up her post at more or less the same time that we had first seen the girls. As we entered her office, Alice was wearing the winter uniform of her own primary school, a dark blue pinafore with a woollen coat and a felt hat.
    ‘My word!’ exclaimed the headmistress. ‘How very quaint!’
    She crouched down to speak to Alice on her level.
    ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you won’t have to worry about that sort of thing here, you know: we got rid of our hats years ago!’
    And at about the same time, a man by the name of Mr Philip Collins, the director of something called the Social Market Foundation, published a pamphlet calling for an end to costumes and all other ‘outdated flummery’ in public life:
    It is time we had an honours system that does not satirise itself … the whole bizarre panoply of OBEs, MBEs, CBEs, DCVOs, MVOs, GCBs, CHs, MNOGs and Yeomen Bed Goers should be put on the bonfire along with the vanity of those who care for such distinctions. We should abolish the titles of Sir and Dame into the bargain. Instead of all this nonsense we should establish a single award, the Order of Merit … awarded at a new democratic ceremony, performed at the House of Commons by the Speaker,
dressed in clothes he would be happy to wear on public transport
.
    So, a bus driver’s uniform, then.
    And perhaps the honours themselves might be dispensed from a form of ticket-machine which the Speaker wears on a strap about his neck.
    On which note, we met up with our bus at the allotted place, in a bus garage in the middle of a shanty-town on the edge of the city, where we were welcomed on board by a bus driver who, though he lacked an official uniform, did have a ticket-machine—an old aluminium London bus conductor’s one, slung across his shoulder on a strap made of knotted string—and who was a model driver in almost every other way. Smiling broadly, he loaded our rucksacks into the baggage hold and showed us to our seats, while helping old ladies to stow baskets of live chickens in the overhead racks and collecting money and handing out tickets, laughing and bantering all the while. He was, as Isay—uniform aside—the perfect driver in almost every respect. The only respect, in fact, in which he fell in any way short, was in his total inability to actually drive a bus. As we were soon to discover.

You Can Run But You Can’t Hide

    The telephone call to the provincial governor’s office was in Amharic. Probably.
    Either way, there exists no transcript of it.
    But if you had been there, if you had been listening in—in the next office, say—and if you’d understood the language, then I imagine that what you would have heard would have sounded something like this:
    ‘He said
what
, you say?’
    ‘Oh, did he, now? He’s having a laugh, isn’t he? And then what?’
    ‘Nothing? What d’you mean,
nothing
?’
    ‘Not answering the telephone? How can they not be answering the telephone? They’ve got a telephone operator. That’s what he does. He operates the bloody telephone. That’s what he’s paid to do.’
    ‘Oh, really? Has he, now? Well, we need to have words with that operator. Strong words. And this Englishman, he’s done
what,
now? Gone? Gone where? I don’t believe it!’
    ‘Yes, well you make sure that you bloody well do.’
    The sound of a phone being slammed back down in its cradle.
    ‘Right, young fellow-me-lad—I’m