Hey, listen to this!

November 19, 2024 by Doctor Vernon Coleman

(I wonder if Doc Vernon wore that shirt at the disco? -Edwin)

The following pieces were taken from Vernon Coleman’s Commonplace Book’ – now available from the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com

Essential being ‘However men may choose to regard me, they cannot change my essential being, and for all their power and all their secret plots I shall continue, whatever they do, to be what I am in spite of them.’ – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Medical students
Medical students used to be allowed to have fun. Filling the senior surgeon’s rubber operating Wellington boots with cold water or ice cubes was a favourite pastime. Wheelchair races down hospital corridors were popular after midnight, when there were fewer innocents around to be injured. Filling filing cabinet drawers with fire extinguisher foam was considered as essential a part of the student’s progress as being able to name the twelve cranial nerves (and their pathways) or being able to identify one of the eight bones of the wrist simply by feel. Taking doors off their hinges and switching them around so that keys did not fit was an excellent pastime for rare dull evenings and undoubtedly enlivened the lives of administrators on dull Monday mornings. And lifting the surgical registrar’s small motor car over a hedge and placing it on the lawn belonging to the matron wasn’t just tolerated but expected. A colleague of mine (who later became an eminent psychiatrist) once helped himself to a bus when he wanted to get back to his flat and found that the official bus service had finished. (He left the bus outside his flat, making life simple for the police.) The medical school dean had a quiet word with the superintendent in charge of the local traffic police and no more was said. And when the traffic police needed road signs and cones they would call in at our flat and borrow what they required. They would, in due course, return what they had borrowed. When I ran a discotheque in the middle of Birmingham, I borrowed the medical school epidiascope and projector so that I could show medical slides and black and white Buster Keaton movies on the ceiling. (I always returned them the following morning.) Any of these activities would today result in disgrace, rustication and eternal banishment. Pranks and genial misbehaviour were regarded as essential stress relievers for students coming face to face, for the first time, with blood, illness and death. Sadly, today’s administrators seem to have lost their sense of humour completely. The medical profession is poorer for it. It is no wonder that today’s young doctors are a dull and timid lot.

The Big Sleep
When the movie ‘The Big Sleep’ was being made, Bogart asked director Howard Hawks who had killed the chauffeur. Hawks realised he had no idea so he asked William Faulkner, who was one of the script writers. Faulkner confessed that he didn’t know and suggested that they ring Raymond Chandler who had written the book on which the film was based. Chandler admitted that he didn’t know either. In the end no one cared because it really didn’t matter who had killed the chauffeur. The film’s plot leaves viewers confused and bewildered. But it’s a great movie and that’s really all that matters.

Missing Stamps
In 1855, a delivery of 55,000 stamps were due to arrive in British Guiana, a British colony in South America. The stamps had been sent from Britain but unfortunately, 50,000 of the stamps failed to arrive on time. (No one knows what happened to them and it’s probably too late to expect them to turn up now, though no doubt there is someone still waiting in hope.) This shortage gave the local postmaster a headache. Without stamps the colony’s letters and newspapers could not be delivered. So the postmaster arranged for the local newspaper to print some one cent stamps (for use on newspapers) and four cent stamps (for letters). The home-made stamps carried an illustration of a ship and the British Guiana motto ‘We give and we ask in return’. These weren’t supposed to be real stamps but were produced to keep things moving while waiting for the official stamps to turn up. And when a replacement consignment of 50,000 stamps eventually arrived in British Guiana, the local postmaster destroyed the ersatz and entirely unofficial stamps and thought no more about them. Since stamp collecting didn’t exist as a hobby none of the ersatz stamps were kept. Except one. Eighteen years after it was thought that the home-made stamps had all been destroyed and forgotten, a 12-year-old school boy called Vernon Vaughan found a one cent stamp (coloured Magenta) while rummaging around among some of his uncle’s papers. (I like to think that he was rummaging with permission.) He sold the stamp for six shillings which doesn’t sound much now but was a fortune in 1873, especially for a 12-year-old boy who probably thought Christmas had come early. Six shillings in 1873 would be the equivalent of around £40-£50 today. Of course, if he’d kept the stamp in good condition and had lived to be 150-years-old he’d now be a multi-millionaire. There is no record of who bought the stamp from young Master Vaughan but it next ended up in the collection of a collector in Liverpool called Philipp von Ferrary. When Mr Ferrary died in 1917 the stamp was sold for $32,500 to an American called Arthur Hind. (You do not, you see, have to be Prime Minister or write a great novel in order to achieve immortality. All you need to do is to buy, and possess for a while, an exceedingly rare stamp.) The stamp was inevitably sold and resold a number of times and each time it was sold the price paid seemed to soar way past inflation. By 1980, the stamp was sold for $935,000 and in 2014 a show designer called Stuart Weitzman bought the stamp in New York for $9,500,000. Unfortunately, Mr Weitzman doesn’t seem to have made a profit on the world’s rarest and most valuable stamp for when he sold it in 2021 it was bought for $8.3 million by the British stamp dealing company Stanley Gibbons.

Caine meets Wayne
In 1966, when he was a rising star, Michael Caine met John Wayne. ‘Never wear suede shoes,’ Wayne told Caine. ‘Why?’ asked Caine, puzzled. ‘One day,’ replied Wayne, ‘you will be taking a pee and the guy next to you will see you, recognise you and say ‘Michael Caine!’ and he’ll turn and piss all over your shoes.’

NOTE
The above were taken from `Vernon Coleman’s Commonplace Book ‘. You can purchase a copy of the book via the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com

Copyright Vernon Coleman November 2024