Welcome to Part Two of The Girl on the Boat, our latest audio adventure in Tales for Our Time and our second foray into the oeuvre of P G Wodehouse - as well as, we hope, a respite from the woes of the world, if only for twenty minutes before you lower your lamp..
Thank you for your initial reaction to this serialisation. Fraser Sutherland, an East Anglia member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes:
It's not often I'm laughing for ten minutes straight at four in the morning to boot but the Tour-De-Force of Mrs. Hignett's exasperated plosives in her 'interview' ( I just love these post-Great War usages in their now nearly unfamiliar meanings, 'make love' being another!) with Bream Mortimer did the trick. As read by Mark Steyn, that was damn funny. Roll on second episode in what looks to be yet another 'corker'.
Thank you, Fraser. In Part Two of The Girl on the Boat, we meet both the girl and the boat. À propos the latter, Wodehouse observes:
State-rooms on ocean liners are curious things. When you see them on the chart in the passenger-office, with the gentlemanly clerk drawing rings round them in pencil, they seem so vast that you get the impression that, after stowing away all your trunks, you will have room left over to do a bit of entertaining—possibly an informal dance or something. When you go on board, you find that the place has shrunk to the dimensions of an undersized cupboard in which it would be impossible to swing a cat. And then, about the second day out, it suddenly expands again. For one reason or another the necessity for swinging cats does not arise, and you find yourself quite comfortable.
To hear me read the second episode of The Girl on the Boat, please click here and log-in. If you missed Part One, you'll find that here.
We hope that general rule will not apply to passengers on next month's Mark Steyn Cruise. However, the famous Marx Brothers scene certainly lingers in the memory:
~If you seek other kinds of diversion, do check out our brace of Orwellian adaptations - Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four - or even a contemporary inversion of a classic, retooled for our wretched times, by yours truly. Whatever your taste, we have plenty of other yarns in all genres over on our Tales for Our Time home page.
Tales for Our Time started as an experimental feature we introduced as a bonus for Mark Steyn Club members, and, as you know, I said if it was a total stinkeroo, we'd eighty-six the thing and speak no more about it. But we're thrilled to say it's proved very popular, and and we now have quite an archive. If you're a Club member and you incline more to the stinkeroo side of things, give it your best in the Comments Section below.
We launched The Mark Steyn Club over seven-and-a-half years ago, and we're truly grateful to all those members across the globe who've signed up to be a part of it - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Cook County to the Cook Islands, West Virginia to the West Midlands. If you've enjoyed our monthly Steyn Club audio adventures and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, we hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
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~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show, Mark's Mailbox, and our other video content;
~My video series of classic poetry;
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~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to The Girl on the Boat but to all our other audio adventures.