The day started off, as all mine do, at a snail's pace.

Perhaps the five-pound note I slipped into his hand was excessive, but, lacking a diamond the size of the Cullinan, I had no adequate means of expressing my gratitude.

Thanks to our free-enterprise system and phenomenal advances in marketing, we now stand on the threshold of an era when the American palate, stimulated by delicacies formerly reserved only for a Maecenas, will one day hold aloft a gustatory torch for the entire world.

Santa Barbara people are conservative-not like in L.A., where everybody wears rhinestones on their glasses to show that they own an airplane factory.

I withheld a riposte that would have seared him if I had been able to think of it, and followed him into the office.

The hands of the clock pointed to one-thirty the other day and my own, more flaccid than vermicelli, dangled inertly beside the dental chair as Dr. Yankwich shoved aside his drill, fired alternate round of compressed air and raspberry shrub down my throat, and straightened up. "There-wasn't it a breeze?" he asked gaily.

A procession of sinuous long-stemmed beauties wound its way to the footlights attired in peasant costumes, large sections of which evidently had been lost in shipment from France.

The problem of what to wear gave me pause; ordinarily, I prefer black tie for these sentimental occasions, as a cummerbund flattens the belly, but lacking at for the moment-the cummerbund, not the belly-I compromised on a vest, and flicked a bath towel over my shoes.

As one who achieved the symmetry of a Humphrey Bogart and the grace of a jaguar purely on pastry, I have no truck with lettuce, cabbage and similar chlorophyll.

Curious race, the English. Once they warm up, there's no telling what they'll do for you.