‘There doesn’t exist a profession that isn’t in here!’ said
a clerk as he flourished an elegantly blue-cloth bound book. I was in the
Oxford office of the Department of Employment, where I’d gone to report that I
had just become unemployed. I proved him wrong: he couldn’t find the job I had
just left, so insisted, against my protests, on putting me down as a
‘Microphone Boom Operator’, because that was something that was in his book and
sounded to him a bit like what I’d been doing.
His little book would doubtless also have had trouble with
some of the positions held by Richard Burton: not the actor, not the
seventeenth century author of ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’, but the nineteenth
century explorer, adventurer, translator of the ‘Kama Sutra’ and the ‘Thousand
Nights and a Night’, etc. etc. At one time he worked for the British Government
as an undercover (perhaps literally) investigator into conditions in the
brothels frequented by members of the Indian Colonial Service. One of his
reports explains that, at the time, the usual price for a pre-pubertal boy was,
if I remember rightly, five and a half rupees. Provided he were uncircumcised
of course: a circumcised boy cost a mere four rupees.
There must I think be some flaw in the reasoning that tends
to the obvious conclusion that the going rate for a foreskin was one-and-a-half
rupees. I suppose foreskins, unlike boys, are not fungible.
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