Fox Tray

Bloke goes up to a bar and orders five pints of bitter, a gin and tonic, a scotch, and a bag of pork scratchings.  Barman asks ‘Would you like a tray?’.  Bloke answers ‘Don’t you think I’ve got enough to carry?’.
Can you give an old joke a home?  For just £24 a month, you could keep Radio 4 Extra going and so ensure that jokes like that are preserved for the nation, whether the nation wants them or not.  For more information, see Barry Cryer.
That joke is so old that there are remarks about it being old written in hieroglyphics.  Old, and true.
Because nobody should operate a tray without being trained in the art first.  By trained I mean nobody should try to use a tray who is not a character in a P. G. Wodehouse story or a drunk uncle who does a rendition of ‘Mule Train!’ that is astonishing in its capacity to shock, delight and put the poor drunk bastard in A&E with a concussion every Boxing Day.  For the unwary, the untrained or those without sufficient upper body strength, the tray is simply a way to drop a lot of things more efficiently.
One should never have to transport more than two cups of tea at any one time unless you are a paid employee or, to give them their politically correct term, skivvy.
The tray itself though is something of a social marvel.
At one end of the social spectrum, say Downton Abbey, the tray itself is made of silver and is worth more than the vicar's virtue, and that's before it's loaded up with enough booze to make the conversation at the dinner table of an English country house bearable to anyone who thinks that 'tying one's own flies' is a simple precaution to prevent unintended. chapout.
Then there is the Formica tray, that has done service in many a home for many a decade.  In more civilised times, the tray would be beringed with the evidence if a million cuppas safely transported from kitchen to front room.  In these less enlightened times, the tray is a personal dining table, allowing each family member to enjoy their evening meal not in the company of each other, but bathed in the gentle light of the idiot lantern.
Let us not forget either the plastic tray, black or red, always slightly damp, picked up at one end of a self serve counter and loaded with sandwiches and beverages before being used to assault the cashier who thinks it's OK to charge you £7.99 for a BLT and a coke.
And let's not forget coke and, in that act, take a moment to reflect the makeshift tray, that flat object that can be used to transport stuff from hither to yon and, when fashioned from something black and shiny, is ideal for serving stimulants.
My new acquisition is far from an impromptu tray, although it is stimulating.  It is, in short, magnificent.  Who can fail to be thrilled by a proper tin tray featuring a country house scene with a couple of foxes frolicking in the foreground.  Who?  As a the owl, also pictured, might ask.
It's a tray that tells a story.  What is happening in the house?  Is there a party, is there a tray within a tray in use?  Or is there bad business afoot, is the daughter of the house being forbidden from marrying her true love, a humble woodcutter, albeit one who has had his woodcuts exhibited at the Tate Modern.  And what of the foxes?  What role do they play in this drama.  Is it Evelyn Waugh, or M R James territory that we're in?  All of these questions and more occurred to me as I saw this object for the first time, but perhaps the most pertinent was 'are you going to buy that tray or just look at it some more?', as posed by the shopkeeper.
I think it's charming.  I am also convinced the house pictured is the one from 'The Mousetrap', which would explain why the tray is just the right size to serve up a book and a cuppa, or a revolver.

Valet app

Why did Apple include a feature on their last iPhone that was supposed to be a robotic personal assistant?

The answer may be that they were trying to integrate the personal organiser functions on their telephone using an interface that saved you from having to flip from feature to feature to try and find out the simplest local information, or remember your dry cleaning, or your mother's birthday. In other words, they spent millions of dollars developing an application on their gadget to replace the Yellow Pages, or a diary, or a post it note, or a conscience. Or some basic sentient being skills like remembering.

This was presumably because the cognitive energy otherwise needed to remember that you are meeting Simon for cocktails at five on Tuesday can be instead channeled either to work on your next oh-so-droll tweet, or vigerously deny that binging on spirit-based drinks early on a Tuesday afternoon is evidence of alcoholism.

Selling a voice recognition package as some sort of personal assistant went well beyond the obvious reason why Apple may have done this; to make iPhone users' relationship with their iPhones even more unhealthy, reaching the point where the dependency is actually a recognised medical condition that The Metro can publish articles and Channel 5 can screen sensationalist documentaries about.

So perhaps the real reason was the economy and Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey cut right through any doubts whatsoever that Britain ever had a chance of becoming, in John Major's term, a classless society. Britain bloody loves being a class-structured society. We love it so much that we recently invented a whole new class - 'under' - to meet increasing demand to have somebody to look down on. It's like the Indian caste system but without decent railways. Downton Abbey's success, penetrating the nation's consciousness like a sex toy in a novel that sells well on Kindle, demonstrated that we know our place. It's in front of the TV at nine o'clock on a Sunday night.

Two things unite Downton Abbey viewers, they all think they are at least one social class higher than they actually are, and all of them think their life would be a whole lot easier if they lived in a stately home and had an army of servants to iron their pyjamas.

That's why Apple produced an interactive feature on their 'phone, because having something that reminds us that we are due at the pox clinic tomorrow, or that we have forgotten to pickup our dry cleaning, again, is the closest that most people are going to get to having staff. Even the gripes about the voice recognition was a deliberate feature, as it allowed people to complain about the staff (it also gave long term Apple gadget users a warm glow of satisfaction, they have been moaning about Apple's interfaces for years, like the handwriting recognition on the Newton. Long term users consider recent adopters nouveau riche).

But the economy being what it is, the middle classes can't afford to retain servants any more, though that doesn't mean that they don't want them, if only to fire.

What's needed is to confront this thing head on and model the interactive features on the iPhone 5 like a traditional country house. This means that instead of having one feature that does everything a bit crap and can't understand you if you have a speech impediment, like a lisp or working class accent, it has lots of apps with different specialist functions.

Surely it can't be that difficult to interface the iPhone's camera with a valet app that could archly criticise both your grooming and your lifestyle with pithy comments, all the while maintaining a faintly camp and slightly sinister tone? A simple click of the shutter, some diagnostics and the phrase 'sir is pleased to jest' will alert you to a potentially shaming sock/tie combination.

Certainly such an app is needed. While the erosion of the servant classes may have resulted in a removal, at least superficially, of some class barriers, it also means men's grooming has reached the point where an association football shirt is considered suitable attire, the away kit being deemed 'formal'.

Yet another change of scene - television

Thanks to the (dark) magic of television, you don't even need to leave your front room now to visit other places. Good news for those who like to watch travel and wildlife documentaries on their huge tellies, great news for those who like to chow down on a family bucket with about the same table manners displayed by the lions on the screen towards that dead zebra.

There are three broad worlds that you can visit through the idiot lantern portal. Entertainment. Education. Drama.

Entertainment usually comes in the form of a continuing series, or soap. This usually consists of the big three. There's Coronation Street, which follows the lives of residents of the seminal street in a fictional Northern town in, from what I can determine, is a fictional bloody universe where no real world actions, events or sometimes physical laws apply. I saw a few seconds of it the other night and the characters looked exactly the same as when I last watched it in the nineties, I had to check that I had not just hallucinated the last two decades in the time it took me to make a cup of tea. I had aged and owned an iPod. Result! The competition is Eastenders, sponsored by Dignitas, a programme so relentlessly harrowing that every single one of its episodes ends with a helpline number and a voice reminding you that if you have been affected by any of the issues, call this number. If the BBC ever went down the X Factor route and made it a quid a minute phone line job, they could abolish the license fee overnight. And fund a mission to Mars. Finally the is the soap set in the countryside. Don't watch that one, suspect its the soap equivalent of 'Horlicks', I suspect other people I dulce, but can't think what would drive me to.

Education usually boils down to some superb footage, in slow mo, of a killer whale biting the head off of a parrot or something, followed by a blistering row when it emerges the while thing was mocked up in an underwater aviary in Hull.

Drama. One word. Downton Abbey. The programme is without doubt a phenomenon, and an excellent example of escapist television, recalling as it does a simpler age, that didn't really exist, where the pace of life was slower and the inhabitants of grand houses had little to worry about save exploding through an excess of kedgeree, Bolsheviks in the shrubbery and succumbing to one of the three fates of the upper classes; pox, ostracisation, or getting your knob caught in a servant, leading to one or both of the others. Viewers want the best for the characters, which is pretty bloody noble, given that they live in a castle. I suppose that the suffering the characters go through, complicated love life upstairs, rickets downstairs, generates empathy. But also, really, who wound't like to like a big bloody house with booze, servants and Elizabeth MacGovern on hand?

Enjoy Downton Abbey responsibly

There are many ways in which a chap can explain his enjoyment of Downton Abbey, the reboot of the class war which aims for the grandeur of ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ in its heydey but, because it is intended for an ITV audience, is pitched rather more at a ‘you rang my lord’ sensibility and which, after all, is Julian Fellows’s attempt to do what Aarion Sorkin did with ‘the West Wing’; spin out a movie idea into a series.

As a Gentleman, one needs no excuse for watching quality costume drama, one can justify one’s close observation by criticising the wearing of a fob watch before supper, or explaining that a particular variety of gin was not actually available to the upper classes until a decade later than the scene depicted. As a gentleman however, you will need to have your excuses ready for watching a programme on ITV. Hardy dependables such as ‘my finger slipped’ or ‘the bloody remote’s not working’, such as are employed when one is discovered watching ‘babestation’ (an act of contrition if ever there was one as, has been remarked upon elsewhere, ‘babestation is essentially a reason for a complaint to Trading Standards if ever there was one’). Like late night viewing, one needs to keep the tissues handy, although one can always, when blubbing at an unexpectedly emotive scene (death of a beloved pet, anything involving rickets and a sickly maid), claim unexpected dust.

As a Player, one will be familiar with ITV. This is how you keep up with the football scores and know when Iceland have Pot Noodle on three-for-two. You will, however, have to have your excuses handy for watching a costume drama, as if discovered you may be accused of being a homosexualist, or educated. On such an occasion it does well to have a box of tissues handy, as one can claim to be knocking one out over the still lovely Elizabeth McGovan, prior to an evening of classic 80s DVDs featuring her when she was still tubby. On no account should you be caught crying while watching Downton Abbey, the shame will stick to you, like a dried tissue, forever.

There is though, one cast-iron excuse for watching Downton, and that’s the Downton drinking game.

There are two versions, ‘child’ and ‘adult’.

For the children’s version, you pick a single character and drink what they drink for each episode. I know what you are thinking – always choose a toff, as they drink more and better. A sound idea in principle, but sometimes a mistake. While a toff can do well in the cocktail and wine with dinner stakes, nobody gets through gin like a servant. Tip: if you know that the storyline may feature a maid who suspects she is pregnant, choose her and bulk-buy the Gordon’s.

The adult version takes a little more effort. You have to drink what everyone in the scene is drinking. This can involve shifting quite a few cocktails and glasses of wine, all the while ensuring that you match the servants gin for gin.

For the Christmas special I decided to go with the adult version, as this was the one time in the year that I had sufficient quantities of wine, spirits and no-work-the-next-morning to play the adult game. I think I was doing alright up to the shoot, but then I think there was drinking, or maybe it was one of the extras in the background having a snort? Was it a shoot or a hunt? I know that people drink an awful lot while hunting because a) without killing a fox you’ve got to get your jollies somehow b) nobody gets in the saddle and gallops over the countryside sober and c) when your horse rears and tosses you into some farm machinery that was parked the other side of a bramble hedge, it’s better to be pre-anesthetised.

The upshot was that the game was an unqualified success but I now need to watch Christmas at Downton again, as I fear I may well have missed a few, if not all, very major plot points.

(The alternative is to take a drink of your choice every time some costume drama incident happens. Depending on your character this can be, for instance, somebody saying ‘iPod’ instead of ‘gramaphone’, or downing a shot every time you spot repressed longing. If it’s poofs, that’s a double! If it’s lesbians…down the bottle and Game Over.)