I have not been to New York for years but the last time I was there all the banks had multiple queues and all

I have not been to New York for years, but the last time I was there all the banks had multiple queues and all these queues were slower than any queue anywhere else in the world. This is no longer true, of course, as the people who run banks have read this book and decided to amalgamate all those queues into one long and slow queue so everyone is now discriminated against.(This may not be true in New York. Most of these seemed to be along the lines of predicting that the other traffic lanes on motorways will always go faster than yours, and it is no use changing lane because now your new lane will go slowest; or that whichever queue you join in a bank will go slower than all the other queues. The result was The New Official Rules, and it has been through several editions and revisions since I have known it.The first edition, as I remember, included a long discussion of Murphy’s Law, which is the old one about “If a thing can go wrong, it will go wrong”, and all the possible extensions of Murphy’s Law.

It was compiled by Paul Dickson, an American lexicographer who compiles and entertains simultaneously.Dickson had the simple but rewarding idea of putting together a book which contained all the non-scientific laws known to man, from the Peter Principle to Sod’s Law.Most of these laws get a single book devoted to them, much as Parkinson’s Law was expanded to fill a whole book, and Dickson thought it would be nice to fillet them all out, take off the unnecessary garnishes and serve them all in one volume. There is another version of “If” and it goes like this:If you can keep your headWhile all about youAre losing theirs,They probably knowSomething you don’t know.I came across this priceless bit of advice, which seems to me a vast improvement on Kipling, in a book called The New Official Rules, a book that I always thought should be world-famous but which never seems to have spread beyond a coterie. Kipling’s “If” was duly voted into first place and the pundits duly and enjoyably mocked the choice.I did not mock the choice, though. That is because I was trying to think of another version of the message in “If” that I had come across somewhere, and I knew that if only I traced it, important locked areas would be opened up to me.It took me several days, but finally I cracked it. I think if you took volume of sales rather than a telephone poll as your guideline, you would find that the poem most often bought by the British is in a greetings card and goes along this sort of line:

On your very special day,
We wish you all the best.And if you plan to go away,Don’t forget your vest.No one, however, voted for that or anything much like it, and our taste for greeting card verse, limericks, bawdy rugby ballads and all the things we really like best was conveniently forgotten.

Actually, I do not believe it is the favourite poem of the British. The quicker he goes and a successor is found, the quicker that Nato can move to deal with more important issues.. I was extremely surprised to learn that the favourite poem of the British is Kipling’s “If”. Innocent or guilty of the charges of corruption, he is merely the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time But every day that he remains in office is a day wasted. It will all prove a diversion from the more profound existential questions that Nato ought to be facing up to. And the omens – Michael Portillo’s Blackpool speech and a resurgent Gaullism in Paris – do not promise a quick or easy answer.None of this is the fault of Mr Claes.