From: sham@cs.arizona.edu (Shamim Zvonko Mohamed)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.wodehouse
Subject: Postulates on Wodehouse
Date: 22 Jan 93 02:45:04 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson

Many years ago, I got this from some newsgroup on the net. The name of the
author seems to be missing; if you recognise this, please let me know!


                  Suspension of Disbelief

1. It is always hay-harvest weather in England; for 54 holes of golf a
day, or for a swim before breakfast in the lake, morning in the hammock
under the cedars, tea on the lawn, coffee on the terrace after dinner.

2. Money is something you should inherit, get monthly as an allowance from
an uncle, win at the races or borrow from Oofy Prosser.

3. All small dogs bite your ankles.

4. All babies are hideously ugly.

5. All small boys are fiends.

6. All aunts are hell, except Bertie's Aunt Dahlia.

7. All butlers have port in their pantries.

8. Old nannies are a menace. They know too much.

9. Drunk men can be very funny.

10. Almost all middle-aged men, even the most pompous (Lord Tilbury, Sir
Gregory Parsloe, Bart., Roderick Spode/Lord Sidcup) were tearaways at some
stage of their youth.

11. Country pubs are open all day long and their home-brew ale is very
potent.

12. All decent-sized country houses have cellars, coal-sheds and potting
sheds for locking people in.

13. Watch out for girls with two-syllable masculine-sounding shortenings
of their Christian names (Bobbie Wickham, Corky Pirbright, Nobby Hopwood,
Stiffy Byng). They get the good man of their choice in the end, but they
spread havoc on the way.

14. Most handsome men have feet of clay.

15. All young men with wavy, marcelled or corrugated hair have feet of
clay and worse.

16. No decent man may cancel, or even refuse, an engagement to a girl.

17. Men and women in love think only of marriage.

18. Rose gardens turn a girl on.

19. If a young man has a single-syllable Christian name, is poor and ugly
and can stop dog-fights, he is sure to be the hero. He may propose to the
heroine at their first meeting and try to shower burning kisses on her
upturned face at their second. She will love this, though she may kick his
shins at the beginning of such an embrace.

20. A bedroom scene is when you discover someone's made you an apple-pie
bed and/or punctured your hot water bottle.

21. Another bedroom scene is when one or more people came and search your
room for policemen's helmets, manuscript Memoirs, notebooks, jewels or
miscreants hiding in cupboards or under the bed.

22. All married couples have separate bedrooms.

23. All bedrooms have on their mantelpieces hideous china figures of the
Infant Samuel at Prayer or dogs. All these figures are dispensable.

24. Chorus girls are all right and earls (Marshmoreton) and nephews of
earls (Ronnie Fish) are very lucky to marry them.

25. Barmaids are all right, and Lords (Yaxley) and Barts (Sir Gregory
Parsloe) are lucky to marry them.

26. A country J. P. can call the local policeman and have anybody arrested
and held in a cell on suspicion of anything. At his whim a J. P. can
send anybody to prison without the option and without a trial, legal
representation or redress, for up to thirty days.

27. If, for a country house, you need a secretary, a Harley Street
loony-doctor, a butler, a cook, a head-gardener, a detective or a valet,
you go up to London by the morning train and, without having made any
appointment by telephone, you find what you want and come back with him or
her by train the same afternoon.

28. The night you go to a night-club is the night it gets raided by the
police.

29. If you are arrested, on Boat-Race night or at a nightclub, give a
false name and address and they will be accepted by the magistrate.

30. On Boat-Race Night in London a young man always gets a bit tight, and
it is then his duty to try to part a policeman from his helmet.

--
"Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale.  He will continue to release
future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.  He
has made a world for us to live in and delight in."           -- Evelyn Waugh
Shamim Mohamed (shamim@cs.arizona.edu)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.wodehouse