Natalia Pastukhova

Between Two Worlds

John Betjeman spent the Second World War in the British Embassy in Dublin, his task being to do the rounds of diplomatic parties and
social events to try and explain to any Doubting Thomas, why Britain was at war with Germany.

Are my former colleagues now similarly engaged or have the invites to lavish lunches all dried up? Is the Ambassador spending most of his time playing snooker in the senior staff-room? Is the First Secretary on a two-day week arranging merely for the correct propaganda to be planted in journals? Are they buying Gucci shoes for their girlfriends while they still can?

We once discovered that an anti-Putin broadcaster had an appointment to have Botox injected into her lips. So a discreet bribe made her look like a  surface-feeding fish. Also as the righthand end of her upper lip was much more swollen, it appeared that she had also been stung by a wasp. All good fun. But extrapolating from Betjeman’s verses and wondering why Russians seem like aliens in the West, I have written this little ditty:

Baffled.

A Martian space-ship landed near
The Royal Albert Hall,
So little green-men went to peer,
And saw a crazy ball.
There rows of earthlings sat en masse,
Quite hypnotised and steeled;
By men who blew down tubes of brass
Or scraped till horse-hair squealed.

My Welsh friend thinks that Russians are crazy, but since he has a speech defect it comes out as, ‘You Wussians are quasi.’ But no, we are not. We are actually very sensible … usually.
N. T. P.

Footnote: Is there not an irony in that someone with a lisp cannot say the word ’lisp’?
L.S.

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Natalia Pastukhova