The Dalrympian Eden
The following are strictly prohibited in the gardens:
- chewing-gum
- canned drinks
- jeans
- basketball
- skateboards
- baseball caps*
- tattoos
- piercings
- pasteurised cheese
- coffee in plastic containers
- the wearing of suits without ties
- televisual apparatus, however portable or compact
- mobile-telephonic apparatus, or any kind of associated prosthesis
- littering
- burqa (except for young Englishwomen on Friday and Saturday nights; they will not be admitted to the gardens unless clad in one — the garment has certain advantages)
- celebrity magazines
- audible use of the word chair for chairman
- conversations about association football
- headphones (the tish-ter-tish that emanates from the user’s supposedly private little world is highly irritating)
- conversations about the Olympic Games
- ‘rock’ or other forms of popular so-called music, also the nodding of heads in time to the ‘music’ in the manner of the fatuous nodding dogs in the back windows of cars
- eating, especially the consumption of ‘fast food’
Thank you for your co-operation.
* Baseball caps, Dalrymple points out, ‘have the effect of making the intelligent look average and the average moronic. Can anyone look intelligent or dignified in a baseball cap?’ They are ‘inelegant at best and hideous at worst’. People wear them in restaurants, ‘which is uncouth and crass, and is a habit that I would like to see suppressed with the full vigour of the law.’
