ODE ON A GRECIAN EARN

“WHAT’S A GREEK URN?” WAS OFTEN the introductory line to a sequence of jokes by Eric Morcambe and Ernie Wise, the most successful comic duo in the history of British stage entertainment, with the reply and punch-line, usually given by Eric, being, “About a hundred Drachma a week.” Or thereabouts. The origin of the pun was a pastiche of a Plautus play in which a character in ancient Rome, having been plunged into the depths of poverty due to reckless overspending announces, in order to save himself from being sold into slavery, “I’ve got a Greek urn.” (i.e. something valuable). There were variations on the joke involving a “Chinese urn”.

GRECIAN 2000 was the brand name of a company which started out in the late nineteen-sixties in Britain and the USA attempting to sell hair dye for men on a market where most men were still afraid of wearing after-shave lest their male friends call them “nancy-boy”, “nonce”, “ponce”, “fruit”, “fairy”, “shirt-lifter” or “brown-hatter” to quote some of the popular slang expressions used to refer to ‘suspected’ homosexuals in the caveman days of the sixties. The TV advert involved a downcast gentleman, greying at the temples, suddenly transformed into a dapper man-about-town wearing flared trousers, seersucker shirt with elephant-ear lapels and sporting lamb-chop sideburns disco-dancing the night away under a mosaic mirror ball as if he had been given his youth back.

BOTH OF THESE ICONIC TV EPISODES that live still in the memory of those of us who truly enjoy classic TV serve to remind us of the fact that there has always been something slightly off the mark about Greekness. Shakespeare’s joke in Julius Caesar, later assimilated into the language, that “it’s all Greek to me” has stood above “double Dutch” in meaning ‘erudite or clever nonsense’. It actually means “I can’t make head nor tail out of it”, which refers to the fact that it has no value as a coin.

THE USE OF THE TERM “GRECIAN VORTEX” by The Daily Telegraph to describe the calamitous state of Portugal, spiraling into a lack of money due to the government cutting away at the finances of the middle-classes, who traditionally keep the economy alive, thus, according to the same newspaper, guaranteeing complete and utter economic and financial collapse within eighteen months, is a more recent spin on the use of adjectives referring to our Hellenic neighbours and friends. Curiously, almost all of the terms tend to be negative.

ALL OF WHICH SUGGESTS THAT letting Greece into the Euro, or even the Eypo, was something of a mistake. But at least for the moment, after the latest frivolous meeting of our glorious leaders in Brussels, the plan is to forgive half of the Greek debt not by asking tax payers, but rather ‘institutional lenders’ “to take a haircut” and write off what they are owed. I have seen some of these institutional lenders’ leaders on TV over the last couple of days, and I am not surprised to see that many of them are bald and/or grey-haired. Further haircuts might be difficult for them, and Grecian 2000 is of no use at all in the long term. I wonder how long it will be before some of them are asking “What’s a Greek earn?”