OUCH! – P.G. Wodehouse

A literary kick in the pants. Reported by Reg Green

This has not been a good week for comedy: the shameful cut- and-run from Afghanistan, Covid still elusive, unprecedented flooding in some places and unprecedented drought in others, all intensified by the organized hatreds of contemporary politics, are enough to make any of us feel low about life. 

But life has never been easy, not even for P.G Wodehouse’s young men about town who have the money and leisure to make the most of it. Take Freddie Rooke, for example, who one day experienced “the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”