An ishoo of life and death, or not

Ian, Jim, Steve L, Jeanette, Barbara, Bobb, Bill, Lynne, Edgar, Bob, Sue and the ever-late Andy.

"Pull out Betty, pull out! You've hit an artery!" exclaimed Barbara Watkins's t-shirt last night and, although it captioned two blood-sucking bugs sitting on someone's arm, it symbolised an evening of conversation that always threatened to hit a metaphorical artery but just pulled out in time.
Age is a constant preoccupation of such a gathering, if only because the winding-sheet hovers behind so many of their chairs, kept one step behind by work, exercise and mental agility. One trip or stumble, though, and the final whistle could blow.
So when anyone short of 100 dies they are now deemed youngsters snatched away far too soon. And if, like retired rocker Bo Diddley they are unseemly enough to fall on their sword as early as 79 the tut-tuts soon echo around Conrad's lounge bar.
Diddley's death called for a check of everyone's ages around the table, as if, just by examining the clocks, they could be stopped or even turned back. But no, yet again Jeanette Lamb came out youngest at just 50 - a baby, a baby, for heaven's sake! And when we discovered that Javier, our agile waiter, admitted to only 35 it hardly seemed fair.
It's a perennial issue, though, and mention of that fashionable word sent Ian off on a rant against the word "issue". "People don't say they've got backache any more," he lamented, "they say they've got an issue with their back. It's ridiculous!" As if to confirm his view I turned to the London Daily Mail website this morning and saw that I should call a certain phone number if I "had issues with accessing" any pages. It's a verbal plague, like viable, y'know and many other stock cliches before it. Tony Benn, the left-wing British politician who renounced an hereditary peerage, has been singlemindedly responsible for the issues rash, or Isshhooos as he calls it in his impeccable English public-school accent. "Politics is all about the isshhoos, not the personalities," he would say in as fine a piece of rubbish as I've ever heard. Of course the personalities are important, because they have to deal with the issues and voters need to know if they have the temperament to handle them.
Another issue worthy of a campaign is all the reels of film and video that went up in flames at Universal Studios on Sunday. The party line from the company is that nothing was really lost because it is all duplicated elsewhere.
However, it turns out that many of those prints may be too expensive to reprint because there will not have a commercial justification. This was disclosed by Bob Birchard, who is busily amassing his schedule for his Cinecon season at the end of August, and relies heavily on prints from the big studios.
"I was expecting nine from Universal," he said, "but I don't know how many I'll get now." So the party line was a convenient oversimplification and some valuable cinematic history may be effectively lost.
Another issue: egg cups and alarm clocks, which have also been effectively lost in southern California, unless you are willing to spend hours hunting through flea markets and other havens of times past. But they are much beloved of Brits and anglophiles as a throwback to an earlier, simpler era.
The deathless subject of Britain v America, which comes up at least once every Monday, sparked a vigorous debate on the merits of tooba v tyuba, address v ADDress, and the origins of "cock a snook" (no one knows, according to google). I certainly didn't realise that Americans address something but live at an ADDress. How odd. And they say tooba but are banned from going to Cyooba.
By Conrad's standards it wasn't a big leap to go from English pronounciation to English colonial rule so that Steve could blame the Brits for Mugabe's ruination of Zimbabwe. But in truth the ruinous slide only began after Britain surrendered the colony. Same in India - and, of course, in the rebellious, truculent United States to the point where is unruled by the universally disowned George Bush. Time for a return to benign British colonial rule the world over: think how many United Nations pen-pushers we could get rid of!
Saying of the evening, from Steve: She's a high llama chick. At least, I think that was it. Or is my hearing going? Anyway, never did get an explanation...