Apistephto, ki'omos alithino*

When Lady Bracknell suggested recently that disabled persons might wish to buy vast quantities of chocolate bars in order to win a place in the Big Brother house, she was merely, to use the modern parlance, "having a larf".


The Dude and Becca were never in any real danger of having to sacrifice their currently svelte figures to consume innumerable fingers of wafer biscuit enrobed in a chocolate coating of indifferent quality.


Lady Bracknell was not at the time persuaded that anyone would purchase more Kitkats than they could realistically expect to have eaten before the sell-by date for the dubious benefit of thereby possibly winning a sojourn in the house in question.

But Lady Bracknell was wrong. Evidently her advanced age has prevented her from being in tune with the zeitgeist. It has been reported that one woman bought over 10,000 Kitkats.

Let us pause for a moment and attempt to envisage how much space 10,000 bars of chocolate take up. No, it is no good. Lady Bracknell has little in the way of spatial awareness at the best of times and, beyond being quietly confident that they would take up a lot of room, cannot project with any confidence just how much room that would be.

The mathematics, though, are easier. Hypothesising that the RRP for one Kitkat bar is somewhere in the region of 50 pence under the decimal currency system (ten shillings, therefore, in old money), this lady has spent five thousand pounds for a one in one hundred chance of being incarcerated for several weeks in the company of persons whose combined intelligence, charm, self-knowledge and integrity (with the notable exception of Pete) approaches that of the average garden slug. What strange times we do live in, to be sure.

Lady Bracknell is in behopes that the 10,000 chocolate bars, despite their indifferent quality and their deplorably low percentage of cocoa solids, have, at least, been eaten. That they have been donated to disadvantaged children who cannot afford their own chocolate bars, and who generally have no option but to subsist on bread and dripping. If it is ultimately revealed that said chocolate bars were merely tossed aside once their wrappers had been feverishly torn off, then Lady Bracknell will be doubly appalled.



*The title of this blog entry has been transliterated from the Greek. Lady Bracknell lived in Athens for a while when she was considerably younger, and "Apistephto, ki'omos Alithino" was a popular television programme at the time. The programme was American in origin: its original title was - if Lady Bracknell remembers correctly - "Strange But True".

As was often the case, a title which had been designed to be short and snappy became somewhat cumbrous in translation. The example of this phenomenon which most sticks in her ladyship's mind is the television adverts for Mars bars. Readers above a certain age will no doubt recall that Mars bars used to be marketed under the following slogan: "A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play". (Lady Bracknell apologises to any reader who finds that he or she now is now humming the accompanying jingle and cannot stop doing so.)

This was translated word for word in the contemporaneous Greek advertising campaign, resulting in the following far-from-compact slogan:

"Ena Mars kathimerina sas voethai na thoulevetai, na xekourazetai kai na pexetai".

Try singing that to the jingle. Lady Bracknell suspects you will run out of music quite some time before you run out of syllables.

(Lady Bracknell's Greek is no longer fluent, and she has never, in any case, been fond of transliteration. She apologises profusely to the delightful inhabitants of Greece if she has made any errors.)