‘I don’t like to admit this,’ said Trump Howard to his friends Putin, Hitler and Jesus, ‘but I’m rather ashamed of my ancestor with the silly name of Simon.’ ‘Oh, really?’ said Putin Smith. ‘Why’s that?’ ‘Well, he wrote an awful lot of rubbish on white flaky stuff they called paper in those days. I found some in the remains of my family’s old living space from way back when The Bomb went off. Somehow this box made of weird metal survived with a few dents in it. The paper was inside.’ ‘How annoying,’ said Putin. ‘I thought we were spared people’s writing when everything was lost in what they called cyberspace.’ ‘When your glorious namesakes earned their places in history,’ said Jesus O’Donnell. ‘Anyway,’ continued Trump, ‘I found this ridiculous story he’d written. Oh, look – there’s Shakespeare! Hi, Shaky! Come and hear about the stupidity of people last century before The Bomb went off…’ Shakespeare Wilcox wandered over. ‘It starts like this,’ said Trump. ‘“If I could go back to any day in history, it would be the one when Adolf Hitler was refused admission to the Vienna Art School for the second time…”’ Hitler Burke and Shakespeare looked confused. ‘“I’d force the art school to take him…”’ read Trump. ‘Well, that sounds supportive,’ said Hitler, who’d never bothered to learn much about his namesake. ‘“I’d threaten to kill them,”’ Trump read on, ‘“if they didn’t give him a place…”’ ‘But if that had happened, we’d never have heard of him,’ said Jesus, who knew more of the Hitler story than the others. ‘He wasn’t a very good painter.’ ‘Well, thank God it didn’t happen, then,’ said Shakespeare with a sigh of relief. ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Hitler, who couldn’t imagine life with another name. ‘Hmmm,’ said Trump, ‘at least in those days they knew how to elect a decent leader.’
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Blenheim Palace | July 2018