Close Quarters #978920

It is, or would be if one bothered to think about it, a well-known fact that there are far more surnames than Christian names. A cursory inspection of the four London Telephone Directories is sufficient proof of the variety of surnames from the A.1. AAA Building Bracket to the Zzymbla who closes those massive and useful volumes. And useful not only in life but in death. For if one can avoid the plea of the kind bringer of the new issue to have its predecessor returned to him (and what is done with the old telephone books we do not know, unless they join the Gargantuan cubic packages of waste paper which we see piled in steamers on the far side of the Thames from the Borough of Riverside), there are a thousand uses for it. As a kitchen adjunct it beats most other gadgets hollow. You can stand on it if that bit of lino in front of the cooker is all greasy where the fat splashed over just as I was dishing up. It is invaluable on the kitchen table because you can stand the big saucepan on it, so sparing that nice new red and white check oilcloth. You can test the iron—whether stove-heated or electric—on it before risking a burn on those cloths I washed out after breakfast and they’re dry enough to iron now. Two of them are as good as a small step-ladder if you want to reach something you think you had put away at the back of that top shelf only I’m not sure if it was there I put it or on top of the spare-room cupboard. Whether the old volumes are sold to the new self-governing State of Borrioboola Gha as a token of civilization, or repulped and made into more telephone-directory fodder, we shall never know, nor do we care. But in the home they are deeply valued, in spite of the yearly argument, nay almost hand-to-hand struggle, with the P.M.G.’s representative whose wretched job it is to try to take them away from us.