Free Making the Cat Laugh by Lynne Truss Page B

those high-powered women heroically pretending they wear slippers in the office. How do they cope with the follow-up questions? Or is it really true that if you say the words ‘boring desk job’, people will enquire no further?
    I remember an alarming moment from an innocent girls’ night out in Twickenham, when I came out of the Ladies to rejoin the little group of rugby fans we’d met (what larks!), and bumped into my friend, menacingly lying in wait. ‘Stop saying you’re a journalist,’ she hissed, with the veins curiously sticking out on her neck. ‘Why?’ I said, jumping backwards. ‘Because it scares off the blokes. Tell them you’ve got a boring desk job.’ I was stunned. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘What if they ask a supplementary question?’ She glared. She fumed. She danced on the spot. ‘And trust you to use the word
supplementary!’
she barked, before barging through the swing door with a mighty shove from the shoulder.
    I realize I could never be a spook. Not just because I would betray secret operations by careless dinner-party chat, but because I consider the invention of alter egos a dangerouspractice. Surely it’s hard enough being one person, without deliberately trying to be two. In order to keep saying ‘boring desk job, oh yes, boring desk job’, you would have to believe in it so completely – the Tube journey, the green triplicate forms – that surely one morning you would wake up and find it true, like something blackly paranoid out of Kafka, even down to the Club biscuits. The horror! ‘Help me, someone, I worked for M I5 , and now I have a boring desk job!’ you would yell, but no one would listen. ‘But you
always
had a boring desk job,’ they would say, with narrowed eyes, like conspirators. ‘Or that’s what you always said.’

    The demise of the Protein Man of Oxford Street last week, at the age of seventy-eight, came as a bit of a shock. Not that I knew him, of course; it’s just that in common with millions of Londoners I felt I had a vague idea what he had on his mind – mainly because it was written on a placard in big white letters immediately above his head. I apologize if you don’t remember him.
    How one hates, in a national newspaper, to strike the pose of the metropolitan bore (which reminds me, aren’t they
rude
in Groucho’s?); yet the ever-present solitary figure in the jostling shopping crowd with his flat cap and specs, his placard, and his deeply peculiar message – LESS PASSION FROM LESS PROTEIN – so far resembles a universal archetype that, as a Londoner, I can hardly believe Stanley Owen-Green just wore a groove in the dusty pavements of Oxford Street for twenty-five years, with outings to Putney Bridge for the Boat Race. Perhaps it helps to say that, like Zelig in the Woody Allen film, the Protein Man was present in every black-and-white picture of London crowds that one has ever seen.
    The point about Mr Green was that he was against protein.I emphasize this because although he devoted the last third of his life to carrying a placard above his head, and possibly sleeping in an extra-long bed to accommodate it at nights, he did not make it easy for the average foreign shopper, stooped under the weight of cheesy meaty nutty food purchases from Selfridges, to understand immediately what he meant.
    At the same time as spreading dietary awareness Mr Green also engendered considerable semantic unease, because for twenty-five years one could frown at his splendidly unpunctuated message, ‘Less fish meat bird cheese egg peas beans nuts and sitting’, and somehow miss its drift. ‘What exactly is your
beef?’
one might have asked him, hilariously, if one had only thought of it.
    When Stanley Owen-Green started this anti-protein campaign in 1968, of course, food was not generally accepted as the enemy within, the way it is now. Devil-may-care people did not quip: ‘I never met a carbohydrate I didn’t like,’ mainly because nobody would tumble