This morning – not atypical of almost any Sunday morning as of late – I received from my erstwhile physician an email in which he included an article preceded by the stock introduction,”I thought you would be interested in this story from The Sunday Times“. The story was entitled, “Stephen Fry: What Jeeves and PG Wodehouse taught me about life.”

Naturally the performances of Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster and Stephen Fry as Jeeves are memorable in a series of TV adaptations of the Wodehouse fictions. But it was long before having seen any of those that I was introduced to the author of this extraordinary humour. It was in the summer following my first year of law school at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. By coincidence my colleague James MacEachern and I had returned to Ottawa for summer jobs, he on Parliament Hill, I with the Judge Advocate General. We had together celebrated receipt of our first year exam results. At one of our subsequent rallies he shared with me his affection for Wodehouse and he gave me a paperback novel by the author.

As an indication of the depth of this modest gift, allow me to relate an incident which marks the moment I first met James. As I say, we were both in law school together, both in our first year. Importantly however James was a native Nova Scotian; and, by common parlance, I was an Upper Canadian (that is, from Ontario).  Like it or not, this distinction continues (I am certain) to this day to mark a longstanding competition between the Maritime provinces and Central Canada.

One of the first social events that I recall at the law school was a gathering at Domus Legis, the fraternity style house on Seymour Street nearby the law school. The first floor of Domus Legis was dedicated to an open bar. The second floor accommodated 4 residential rooms for students.  By coincidence I lived in one of those rooms.

Anyway…this social convention on the first floor was held on a cool but bright, sunny October day. I had been out of the House doing something, so when I arrived at the House – and seeing the foregathering was already under way, rather than head back upstairs then down again, I simply walked into the hall on the first floor where people were already gathered.  I was still wearing my racoon coat – which of course I didn’t bother to remove in the circumstances.

As you might expect – being as it was very early in the new year – most of us in the hall did not know one another. Accordingly I simply chatted with whomever was in hearing distance, making the usual introductions, etc. When the conversation lulled at one point – and I was standing blankly holding a beer in my hand – I noticed there was a gentleman standing next to me.  He seemed to be eyeing me up and down – though without having spoken nor apparently interested in communication.  When I turned and looked at him curiously, he suddenly spoke and said (in an inquisitive tone), “So you finally took the horse out back and shot it?”

Naturally it was the beginning of a comedic relationship. His cheek about my apparel combined nicely with the light satire of the Upper Canadian theme.

Though it is not especially related to this story, when James an I were together at my parents’ home in Ottawa to celebrate our successful completion of first year studies, we visited the immediate neighbour, a Judge.  My late mother naturally extolled the nearby presence of a member of the Superior Court of Justice.  When James and I were with the Judge in his home, regaling the usual lies about law and law school, the Judge disclosed the nature of some of the cases that had recently appeared before him.  Perhaps animated by the liquor we were drinking or the intelligence that I was working for the JAG office, the Judge suddenly mentioned a case involving buggery. While I knew instinctively that the case involved something licentious, I was then only 21 years old and hadn’t yet cultivated the art of promiscuous language.  Basically – apart from the salacious nature of the term – I hadn’t a clue what it meant.

This pointless detail would of itself remained forever irrelevant where it not for the fact that not long afterwards the Judge was summarily removed from the bench for having had sex on his office desk with prostitutes who appeared before him in court. My mother – who knew the Judge’s wife and had seen their boys – never accepted the propriety of the accusations.

This unanticipated connection with James and PG Wodehouse succeeded to preserve in my mind the extremes of behaviour which can colour an account of life. I confess as well that there are key expressions of Bertie Wooster which I have never forgotten; and whenever I feel in the need for an injection of buoyancy, Wodehouse is a ready palliative.