If a lion could talk, it wouldn't understand itself.

I am a huge fan of Michael Frayn. Have been for years, ever since I read his pieces in the Observer in my youth. Years later I ran into my old schoolfriend Nigel Williams, by then a famous novelist, and he promised to introduce me to Frayn (who is a friend of his) but he never did, the ratbag.

We often dream up imaginary kinships with people we idolise, and I did this with Frayn. Like him, I did a first degree in Philosophy in Britain at a time when the dead hand of Wittgenstein lay even more heavily on the land than it does now. (He did his degree at that coven of Wittgensteinians, Cambridge). And this wonderful parody suggests to me that Frayn found the experience fully as exasperating as I did. To judge by this parody, the experience must've really, really, really annoyed him. And it is one of those very rare and precious things, a parody that works on the same material as the text it parodies, and does it better.. (For those of you who were not force-fed Wittgenstein, the line that Frayn is spoofing is ``If a lion could talk, we wouldn't understand it''.)

At the time of the 1966 general election in the UK (or it might have been the 1970 election) the Observer had a feature in which it asked various fairly visible people whom they were going to vote for. Colin Cowdrey said he would vote for the Conservatives beco's they had the best team (I don't think I'm making this up);
Frayn said

``I shall vote Labour; I always do: there must be some end to the tyranny of the fortunate''.

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