Toasts

[Note, January 2010: I have decided to discontinue the Toasts section of Gruts, as it was frankly a bit of a pain to maintain. The following has been left here for reasons of historical interest.]

My local pub used to run a game called Deadlines, where, for a 50p stake each week, you could nominate a celebrity who you thought wasn't looking too well. If your nominated celebrity died the following week, you won all the money collected so far. If no celebrity nominees died for a while, the eventual payouts could be substantial.

Unfortunately, duplicate nominations weren't allowed, and, by the time I started playing Deadlines, all the obvious choices had gone, so I ended up choosing Edward Woodward and the obnoxious Mary Whitehouse (who is now dead, by the way). I never won anything, and the game eventually folded.

Some people thought Deadlines was a bit sick. It did, however, ensure that you paid particularly close attention to the Obituaries columns.

Even before I started playing Deadlines, my friend Fitz and I used to raise a toast in our weekly pub sessions to any celebrities who had died in the last week - whether we admired them or not. The toasts to the ones we did admire were intended as a tribute; the toasts to the ones we most definitely didn't admire were a satisfying way of saying good riddance.

The toasts raised on the Gruts website are very much intended as tributes to people I admired. Unlike my pub-based toasts, I haven't raised on-line toasts to people I didn't admire, if for no other reason that readers might not detect my irony. I will, however, no doubt occasionally succumb to the temptation to acknowledge the death of someone I particularly disliked. When I do so, I will take great care to separate them from their more worthy co-deceased.

The on-line toasts only began in May 2001, so you'll just have to guess whom Fitzroy and I toasted before then.

Anyway, enough of my yapping! The toasts: