Advice
A Chap’s Guide to Disappearing Torquil Arbuthnot outlines the various ways in which a Chap in need of anonymity may disappear off the face of the earth
T
he desire to disappear off the face of the earth can arise from the simplest of motives, such as a broken heart, galloping accidie or a warrant out for one’s arrest. Often, however, the necessity of hooking on the false beard and escaping is due to circumstances beyond one’s control: the failure of the favourite in the 3.40 at Kempton Park; the lack of imagination of the Serious Fraud Office when it comes to understanding one’s accounting practices; the insistence, at the point of a shotgun, of a prospective father-in-law that one marries
his daughter; the unreasonable suspicion of the police at your explanation that you were using an oxy-acetylene torch in Mappin & Webb at 2 o’clock in the morning to search for a dropped cufflink. Turning one’s face to the wall and giving up is one way of dealing with life’s vicissitudes, as is retiring to the library with a glass of whiskey and a pearl-handled revolver. But beyond faking one’s death (the pile of clothes left on the beach, the empty yacht found drifting in the Channel) there are more alluring ways of evading the pettifogging inconveniences that life can hurl at us.
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