Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I hope to be presenting another midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Steyn Club members live around the planet at our regular hour in the western hemisphere - 3pm North American Eastern - but across the Atlantic for this month only it will air one hour early - that's to say, 7pm Greenwich Mean Time/8pm in western and central Europe.
Meanwhile, welcome to Part Five of our brand new Tale for Our Time: The Girl on the Boat by P G Wodehouse, published in 1922.
There are two ways to enjoy our Tales - either as a slug of nightly audio Ovaltine twenty minutes before you lower your lamp. Which means cliffhangers-a-go-go. Or you can save them up for a binge-listen on a long weekend car journey - in which case you're hanging on a cliff only for the few seconds it takes to click the next episode. Better a binger than a whinger, as the old Australian proverb has it.
Thank you for your many comments this agreeable diversion from the woes of the world. Fraser, an East Anglia Steyn Clubber, writes:
It's not often I'm laughing for ten minutes straight at 4 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 like to be yet another 'corker'.
If you like your "post-Great War usages", Fraser (it's actually a little earlier than that), there is another "interview" in tonight's episode:
Further pour-parlers having passed with her aunt, two more sisters, and her little brother, he felt that the moment had arrived when he might send her a volume of Shelley, with some of the passages marked in pencil. A few weeks later, he interviewed her father and obtained his consent to the paying of his addresses. And finally, after writing her a letter which began "Madam, you will not have been insensible to the fact that for some time past you have inspired in my bosom feelings deeper than those of ordinary friendship...." he waylaid her in the rose-garden and brought the thing off.
Will it go that smoothly for our hero? Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Five of our adventure simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes of The Girl on the Boat can be found here, and previous Tales for Our Time here.
If you'd like to join us in The Mark Steyn Club, we'd love to have you: please see here. And, if you've a chum who enjoys classic fiction, we've introduced a special Steyn Gift Membership: you'll find more details here.
Please join me tomorrow evening after our Q&A for Part Six of The Girl on the Boat.
