FRIEND: You mean Harry Carpenter.
COLUMNIST: What?
FRIEND: Not Humphrey Carpenter.
COLUMNIST: Well yes. Yes, obviously. So anyway, what makes me cross is this. Here we are, you and I, having this highly informed and sophisticated conversation about the ins and outs of grand slam tennis, and the papers insist that when women become obsessed with Wimbledon, it’s only because of the so-called hunk factor, because of the gorgeous pouting well-built athletic blokes such as Michael Stich and Goran Ivanisevic and – sorry, can’t go on, throat a bit dry. Anyway, the idea is that we’re watching the legs and the midriffs, not the tennis, I mean, that’s absurd, obviously?
FRIEND: Eh?
COLUMNIST: Absolutely absurd.
Pause.
FRIEND: But they’ve stopped showing Andre’s midriff, in any case. I phoned up yesterday to complain.
COLUMNIST: You did? Good for you. I mean, I hope you also mentioned their excellent coverage of his stunning returns of serve, and inventive cross-court passes?
FRIEND: No, I didn’t. I said, I am a licence payer and if I want to see the dreamboat’s tummy, the dreamboat’s tummy I shall see.
COLUMNIST (struggling, but steadily losing her grip): Gosh. Whereas me, well, scoreboard, let-cord judge, first service, Cyclops –
FRIEND: Give it up, Lynne.
COLUMNIST: Shall I? Drop-shot, foot-fault, er … Are you sure?
FRIEND: Definitely.
Pause.
FRIEND: I see Lendl got knocked out, then.
COLUMNIST (resigned but happy): Never fancied him, myself.
FRIEND: Nor me. Great player, I suppose?
COLUMNIST: No, no. Something to do with those stringy legs and the unattractive way his socks stayed up.
FRIEND: I know exactly what you mean.
I was interested to read in last Monday’s paper that a possible side-effect of low-fat diets is an increase in aggressive behaviour, especially since I have now reached the stage in my own low-fat diet where I would happily mug somebody for a small sliver of cheese. Aggressive, eh? Take off your glasses and say that. It is the sort of story that makes you uncertain; it muddles things up that were previously clear. Was I being aggressive when I forced copies of Rosemary Conley’s Hip and Thigh Diet on unwilling friends, instructing them to read it (or else)? I looked back with a sad little smile to the innocent days when I could say that the only drawback to low-fat diets is that they make you quite thin, thus making it difficult to store pencils in the folds of your torso.
But now, it seemed, there was one of those pesky little hormones to be considered – a hormone moreover that refused to be secreted to the brain unless there was sufficient cholesterol around, the upshot of which might be a propensity for violence. ‘Bastard,’ I said, involuntarily. I scoured the rest of the paper for supporting evidence (linking murders with Ambrosia Low-Fat Rice Pudding) but was disappointed. There was no statistical survey showing that the people who knock off policemen’s helmets invariably prefer St Ivel Gold to butter in a blindfold test. I suppose we shall just have to sit back and wait for the inevitable confirmation of the story from the American law courts. It cannot be long, surely, before the first serial killer is acquitted by an American jury on the grounds of diminished responsibility (by reason of cottage cheese).
In my own case it is hard to establish any straightforward cause and effect, since I started the low-fat diet simultaneously with embracing the single life. Any character change, therefore, might certainly be the result of pizza deprivation; but on the other hand, perhaps I have just been unhinged by the burden of sole custody of the cats. The causal borderline is murky. I have noticed, though, that I get extraordinarily jumpy and irrational in the vicinity of high-fat food. For example, the idea of eating crisps now alarms me so much that in Sainsbury’s I remove them surreptitiously from other people’s shopping trolleys, and scuttle off to hide them in the bin-bag section. The fight against fatty food has become a personal mission. Yesterday my next-door neighbour mentioned that she is partial to a spot of Camembert and I reacted with such horror that she might have said she enjoyed jumping in front of tube trains to test their braking distance.
The only way to set one’s mind at rest, I decided, is to do a bit of independent research. Follow a clamping unit around central London, for example, and offer cubes of lard to people whose cars have just been immobilized. ‘Do not attempt to move it!’ I might chuckle, springing out from behind the clamped car and proffering a platter of Cookeen-on-sticks. ‘I wonder if you would be interested in taking part in a little survey I am doing?’ I can imagine some interesting results. Or I could attend the check-out in Sainsbury’s (surrounded by people saying, ‘Funny, what happened to the crisps?’) armed with a tub of low-fat yoghurt and a packet of pork scratchings, so that I can nibble little bits from each, monitoring my reactions. I could stand there with my hand on my head saying, ‘Which way? Which way?’
The check-out is the right place for the experiment because while other people seem undisturbed by the sight of their shopping hurtling serially towards them down the conveyor belt and slamming into a multiple pile-up at the end, I loathe the avoidable frenzy and entertain visions of clonking the check-out lady on the head with a tin of Felix to slow her down. The only trouble is that, what with all the frantic packing and sweating and muttering, I shall probably forget to eat the pork scratchings. I get too worked up, really; and I don’t suppose diet is the answer. Either supermarkets must adopt the American system of packing the bags for the customer, or the government must relax the gun laws. The question: ‘Could you work more slowly please?’ would pack a lot more punch if backed up by a loaded .45.
Last week’s article was not only concerned with violence; it also suggested that low levels of cholesterol could be linked to unsuccessful suicide attempts. Great. Wonderful. First class. I am reminded of the time an editor said to me: ‘Perhaps you could just be like Dorothy Parker,’ and I misunderstood. What, keep slashing my wrists and drinking shoe polish? Keep waking up in hospital to hear wisecracking friends say: ‘You’ve got to stop doing this, or you’ll make yourself ill’? If this low-fat existence offers the fate of Dorothy Parker, perhaps it is time to reconsider. After all, even the exciting prospect of death by spontaneous combustion (which I’ve always fancied somehow) is less inviting from the low-fat point of view, since one’s body would burn for a considerably shorter time than would make the option properly worthwhile.
In my flat, I have a small flight of steps, and it worries me. Because one day, in a blur of windmilling arms and high-kicking legs, I am convinced it will shape my end. In itself, this staircase looks innocent of hazard: there are no loose stair rods, and if ever I discover ball bearings, bars of soap, or sheets of slippery tin-foil on the top step, I clear them carefully before starting my descent. No, the trouble is, these stairs lead to the kitchen – and anyone who lives with cats will instantly grasp the nature of my fears. For whenever a cat hears someone heading, with a loaded tray, in that direction, he looks up, thinks quickly (but not deeply) – tins! cat-bowl! tea-time! – and makes a blind dash, in the manner of a furry bowling ball hurled with gusto down an alley. There is a heavy expectant pause as he thunders targetwards, and then crash – the pleasant hollow sound of stricken skittles is reluctantly simulated by the windmilling lady with the tray.
My only consolation, as I await this disaster, is to muse (albeit tautologically) that ‘most domestic accidents occur in the home’. And how right I am. A recent DTI report about domestic mishaps evidently included the extraordinary statistic that twenty-nine people last year were injured by dressing-gowns, while six named place-mats as their personal Waterloo. Yes, place-mats. Adjust these numbers upwards to account for people too proud to admit to misadventure by warm fluffy towelling or slim cork rectangles and we can see the extent of the danger in our homes. But how was it that 101 people fell victim to their own trousers? How was it that a lone peculiar person was af
flicted by a tea-cosy? Crime novelists must be in ecstasy at the news. Suddenly it is permissible for a suspicious detective to peer quizzically at a lifeless body, suck his teeth, and say, ‘Of course, this may be just a straightforward tea-cosy casualty, but I rarely trust the most obvious explanation.’
Ah yes, trousers, dressing-gowns, bread-bins, place-mats, tea-cosies, slippers – all those innocent Christmas gifts now carry the unfortunate connotation of the loaded gun. Personally, I find myself wondering (with a feverish urgency) what sort of place-mat. I mean, the rough raffia sort could give you a nasty scratch, I suppose; and the smooth laminated hunting-scene sort might possibly raise your blood pressure if you were an animal-rights activist. Neither, on the face of it, could land you in hospital.
No, only one explanation will satisfy all the scrappy data at my disposal: that instead of umpteen implausible domestic accidents taking place last year entailing tea-cosies and slippers, there was just one enormous out-of-hand Christmas party involving 101 drunken people spilling on to a main road wearing their trousers on their heads, and six attempting to skate across a frozen swimming pool with place-mats strapped to their feet. It’s the only solution that makes sense. ‘Let’s break into the dressing-gown warehouse,’ yells someone wearing a knitted tea-cosy as a balaclava, twenty-nine people following behind him, stumbling. But alas, once inside, blinded by the tea-cosy, he falls against a lever, and from a great height a large bundle of dressing-gowns promptly plummets towards their unwitting bonces. Meanwhile, back at the party, the innocuous game ‘Toss the slipper in the bread-bin’ has been proceeding safely until somebody has the bright idea of transferring the action downstairs to the kitchen. At which point a cat wakes, looks up, thinks quickly (but not deeply), and – well, you can guess the rest.
The DTI does not investigate the statistics, just tabulates them, so it’s no use asking for the true story. Presumably most people made their statements in a state of shock and blamed the wrong thing. ‘Why did you fall downstairs, madam?’ ‘The tray!’
A friend was once waiting in an uphill queue at traffic lights when her car was threatened by a van in front, slowly rolling backwards. Having honked her horn in vain, she ran to the driver’s door, and discovered a woman piling plates on the dashboard. Evidently, they had slipped off; hence the neglect of the handbrake. ‘Plates!’ she laughed, by way of inadequate explanation. ‘But they’re all right, luckily.’
A few years ago the American magazine National Enquirer ran a very helpful tip-list entitled ‘Ten Ways to Spot Whether Your Grandparent is an Alien’. Evidently a large number of American teenagers were racked with worry on this issue and required some official guidelines for confirming or allaying their suspicions. So the Enquirer did its civic duty, telling youngsters to peel their eyes for certain telltale signs. ‘ONE,’ it blared, ‘Gets up in the night for a glass of water. TWO: Remembers things from long ago with clarity, yet can’t summon up details of yesterday afternoon. THREE: Takes naps.’
The article did not explain what dastardly mission these alien wrinklies had been sent to Earth to fulfil, so naturally one formed one’s own theory on the available evidence. Clearly they came here in their silver shiny spaceships with the sole intention of putting their feet up and grabbing forty winks. Independent evidence backs up this notion. For as any astronomer will gladly affirm, very few comfy chairs have thus far been sighted on the surface of Alpha Centauri.
I mention all this because, according to a bizarre item in The Times Magazine recently, the American passion for aliens has not declined. True, the National Enquirer no longer carries those entertaining whole-page adverts for genuine extraterrestrial mineral samples (actual size) ostensibly brought back by Wyoming women from adventures in hyperspace. But apparently a new American movie in which a spaceship abducts a humble logger from Arizona (keeping him five days) is billed on its posters as ‘Based on a True Story’. It pulls you up short, this kind of thing. I mean, leaving aside the objection that it can’t possibly be a true story, doesn’t anybody stop to ask why superintelligent aliens would do it? I mean, what’s in it for them?
It ought to be a source of national pride that in Britain we don’t automatically think in terms of aliens. The ‘Lord Lucan Spotted in Sea of Tranquillity’ story, accompanied by fuzzy aerial photo, somehow fails to grab our imagination, which should be cause for whoops of joy. Brits who abscond from work will possibly resort to far-fetched tales of illness or amnesia, but rarely do they claim to have spent a week in a spaceship unable to phone the office because the aliens (ironically) hadn’t heard of Mercury.
‘So where’ve you been?’
‘Well, with aliens.’
‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘Was it good?’
‘Fine, yes. We did some crop circles. They’ve got a special attachment.’
‘What were the aliens like?’
‘Funny. They slept a lot, and kept asking me to remind them who I was, and then occasionally they got up for a glass of water.’
Just why America is more susceptible to ‘true-life’ alien stories is hard to account for (at least without being offensive) but it obviously entails a childish confusion about religion and space – which is a reasonable mistake, I suppose, since both originate in the sky. Visitations from the universe are the new-world equivalent of weeping statues in Catholic Europe, and in traditional American space movies, the identification of the visitor with the Messiah is so complete as to be almost laughable. In John Carpenter’s film Starman, the alien comes in peace, is persecuted, raises the dead and ascends on the third day in a blaze of light. The fact that he also samples apple pie (‘Terrific’) and wins half a million dollars in a casino does not detract from the analogy, it simply confirms that this is messianism American-style.
Of course, the ludicrous feature of the aliens-from-space belief is that it expects these visitors to take a wise, fair and godlike interest in the way we are running our planet, when it is more likely (as Woody Allen once pointed out) that they will just turn up one day and dump their laundry – socks, underpants, shirts, jackets – with instructions to have it ready by Thursday. Meanwhile they will settle down in front of our TVs for a mass alien after-dinner snooze. Another fond illusion bites the dust, but still, it’s only the same lament that has resounded through the ages. We ask for bread, and they give us stones; we ask for gods, and they give us ironing.
After the price of Whiskas and the paucity of NatWest Servicetills in the Marylebone area, my favourite conversational topic is garden sheds. I can wangle them into any kind of interchange – from the anecdotal (‘Roald Dahl? Writes in his shed, you know’); through the philosophical (‘But how can you tell your shed is still there when it’s night-time and you can’t see it?’); to the seductive (‘I’ll just pop down to the shed and slip into something more comfortable’). I am, you see, hoping that people will ask me to tell them more about my shed. But, strangely, no one ever does. The other day I even (Oh God, did I really?) tried to ‘talk sheds’ with Melvyn Bragg.
Perhaps one day someone will put together a glossy book called The South London Shed and ask me to write a little piece: about when my shed was built, what additions I’ve made, and how I sit in it all day wearing a straw hat and watch other people do the gardening. But I doubt it. That sort of request goes to the idle rich, like the people who have contributed to The English Garden Room, edited by Elizabeth Dickson (Weidenfeld £8.95). Never have I been more troubled by a large-format paperback. For it has made me discontented not only with my shed, but with my entire lot in life.
It must be said that the book is full of stunningly beautiful photographs. Conservatories are lovely places: huge and healthy plants set against cane furniture, stone paving, tall jardinières, classical statuary, and the odd piano – you can’t go wrong. Lady Aberconway has a large rectangular pool in hers. ‘The surface of the pond,’ says the caption, ‘unites by its reflection two convex shapes in perfect harmony.’
But it’s all this harmony
that’s so upsetting. All this tranquillity and all this leisure to enjoy it. I can’t bear to think of it – that some people actually have the time to swing in hammocks. Or is that just an illusion fabricated for the book? Perhaps Princess Nicholas von Preussen is really just as driven as the rest of us – hanging about in the vet’s waiting room with her dachshund (Lily); getting into the slowest queue in Sainsburys. The most violent envy I have ever felt goes out to Mary Douglas-Scott Montagu, who spends her summer months playing Wendy House in a showman’s caravan in the grounds of Beaulieu. She collects up the family pets and a couple of good books and ‘lazes around’. ‘It is the most luxurious and magic escape from the mundane pressures of everyday life.’ Huh.
Perhaps this is what such publishing is for: to sustain the existing social order by reducing its readers to a kind of wormy mulch of envy, despair and class hatred. But come the revolution, I can tell you this: there’s going to be a lot of flying glass.
About this time last year, a friend accused me of having ‘let myself go’. And I remember being quite taken aback. I put down the bottle of salad cream I was drinking, and changed the receiver to the other hand, while considering how to reply. ‘But my boyfriend says I’m lovely,’ I protested, at last. ‘He likes me the way I am.’ ‘Oh, come on,’ was the rejoinder. ‘Surely you can see he’s just saying that.’ I bit my lip, slid down in the chair and unbuttoned the waistband on my elasticated jumbo-sized trousers.
Luckily the boyfriend returned at that moment from the chip shop, so I was obliged to ring off. But later, while licking tomato ketchup off the hem of my baggy T-shirt, I told him about the conversation, and asked him what he thought. He said my friend was probably just jealous, and that I should take no notice. But for some reason this cure-all answer failed to satisfy. After all, she was right: I had stopped buying nice clothes, had become addicted to chocolate milk-shakes and taramasalata (sometimes in thrilling combinations), and had started to warm to Shelley Winters as a potential role-model. But what alarmed me most was the memory of my own pathetic little defence: ‘My boyfriend says I’m lovely.’ I could not believe I had said it.