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most of the works of Captain W. E. Johns, creator of Biggles and Gimlet (and of their female equivalent, the hearty and heroic ‘Worrals of the WAAF’). In a satisfactory row (on my shelf at least, if not in publishing order), three of the Gimlet books are Gimlet Lends a Hand, Gimlet Bores In and Gimlet Mops Up . Gay innuendo simply rocks. Even Monty Python couldn’t do better than that, although their Biggles Flies Undone parody made me laugh so much when I first read it in one of the Python books it gave me a serious asthma attack. True. It was the fact that they had so clearly read the books themselves with exactly the same attention to style and mannerism that I had that made me rock backwards, kicking my legs in the air in delight and wheezing like a dying emphysemiac. The point I suppose I am trying to make is that I will have the enormous pleasure of reading Howard Jacobson’s book again in a year or so as a fresh and new surprise.
    A friend of mine pointed out recently how absurd it was that people reread so little: do you only listen to a piece of music that you love once? Anyway, shush. You’re distracting me. The whole point of this opening section is to fill in the newcomers on the subject of La Vie Fryesque . And if you are reading this and have also read my previous stabs at autobiography you have been warned: there will be repetition, and possibly even self-contradiction. What I remember now may differ from what I remembered five or ten years ago. But if you feel you know my life up until the ending of The Fry Chronicles and have no yearning for a redux reduction, you may happily jump from black arrow to black arrow or pop off and get on with your little tasks about the home, maybe settle into that TV box-set you’ve always meant to get around to because everyone else seems to have watched it but yourself. Let me try meanwhile to run by the relevant earlier history of my life as briskly as I can.
    There is always the opportunity, I might add, for you to put this book down right this very minute and immediately download or buy in hard copy Moab is My Washpot and The Fry Chronicles , consume them in that order and save both of us all this repetition, but I wouldn’t like to come over as greedy for sales. We’re all above that kind of unpleasant mercantilism.

     
    So where do I pick the story up from? From whence do I pick up the story? Whence do I pick up the story? Alistair Cooke, the British journalist best known for his broadcasts from America for the BBC, once told me that when he was a very young man contributing material for the legendary C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian he had submitted a piece of copy which included the phrase ‘from whence’.
    ‘Tell me, laddie,’ Scott had asked, tapping an angry pair of fingers on the offending phrase, ‘what does the word “whence” mean?’
    ‘Er … “from where”?’
    ‘Exactly! So you’ve just written “from from where” – tautology: go and correct it.’
    Cooke was foolish enough to stand up for himself. ‘Shakespeare and Fielding both frequently used “from whence”.’
    ‘Well, they wouldn’t have done if they’d written for the Manchester fucking Guardian ,’ said Scott.
    So. While the others are still at their chores, let me pick the story up for the new arrivals. The others can pick it up whence I dropped it. Doesn’t sound right to me, but there we are, Scott must have known what he was talking about.
    Our hero, after multiple scholastic expulsions (this is me I’m referring to now, not Alistair Cooke or C. P. Scott – I’m attempting a paragraph of that Christopher Isherwood/Salman Rushdie kind, where I refer to myself in the third person: it won’t last long, I promise), after an adolescence steeped in folly, misery, heart-shredding mooncalf romance and a short lifetime of wayward self-delusion and multiple crookedness, a sly, cocky, guileful and self-fantasizing fool, found himself imprisoned for credit-card