Following my recent blog about reading in the lavatory (as Nancy Mitford would say) I want to give you a progress report- on my reading of the complete works of Shakespeare.

At the moment I am deep into Hamlet- a play which at the age of about 16 I had a small part in act 5, so I became very familiar indeed with the play as I waited, each night , for my entrance.
I got stuck into Polonius’s speech of advice to Laertes today.

Now before he goes into the boring bit about borrowing and lending (unbelievable that this was learned by heart by every banker and builder of a certain age in Ireland ) Polonius has a bit of advice about his dress sense to his son :

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy ; rich not gaudy.
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station,
Or of a most select and generous, chief in that.

There you are lads, that says it all.
Polonius , you see, was the Gok Wan of his day.

But it was not these words of wisdom that struck me, in the loo , about this man today; it rather was that he really was, almost single handedly , responsible for poor old Hamlets final tragic end.

If he hadn’t gone buggering about behind the Arras, eavesdropping on Hamlet and upsetting him, Hamlet would not have stabbed him , Ophelia would not then gone and drowned herself in her grief and Laertes would not have fatally wounded Hamlet in a duel.

As I said ; it was all Polonius’s fault.