I am sorry to ruin the illusion, but we all have to learn some time that there is no Mankowitz in the advertising industry; there is no mad poet dreaming of Dulux colours; it’s all done by meetings. ‘Now, a few more greens and thank goodness we can stop for lunch. Anybody got a word that goes with Kale? Anybody?’ ‘Er … ‘‘yard’’, sir.’ ‘Mmm, so you think we should call it ‘‘Yard kale’’, Robbins? Sounds all right to me.’ ‘No, sir. I meant – er, kaleyard.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘There’s something called curly kale in the dictionary, sir.’ ‘Splendid. All right, hands up for Curly kale. Next!’
I have never lingered in cosmetics halls. In fact, I have never really understood what they are for. Why do they invariably lurk at the entrance of department stores, blocking one’s progress to the real business inside? Is it a subtle fumigation process? Or is the idea to soften you up? The luxuriant chrome and lights, the shrill exciting perfumes, the gallons of moisturizer (in tiny pots) – I figure that this sensual riot is designed to trip up the women, and remind them that shopping is basically self-flattery and treats. By the time you actually buy something, you see, you feel so madly feminine that you shell out wildly for an extra tube of bath sealant.
But I am only guessing, because personally I always draw a deep breath at the threshold to the shop, take a last memorizing look at my list (‘Draino; Cat-flap accessories; Something for getting Ribena stains out of sofa’) and then whiffle quickly and invisibly between the little counters, tacking athwart this alien sea of feminine trinketry with my eyes half-closed against the unaccustomed glamour of it all. If I pause nervously to examine a lipstick, and a lady asks ‘Can I help you?’ I freeze, and then scuttle sharpish to the lifts.
But suddenly, a few weeks ago, I felt an urge to paint my fingernails. It was weird and unaccountable. One minute I was quite normal and stable, attempting to play a well-regulated game of hide and seek with cats who can’t (or won’t) count to twenty. And the next, I was overtaken by an access of femininity, humming ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl’ with brio, and breezing into cosmetics halls demanding a range of nail colours and offering to trade unwanted cat-flap accessories by way of payment. Funny how life can change.
Single life suddenly looked quite different, you see: I caught a glimpse of another world, originating in the sort of TV advertisement where pink gauze curtains billow sensuously in a boudoir full of white light and a woman with fantastic hair pampers herself with a beauty product (or tampons). Most people probably regard nail varnish as either functional or tacky, but to me it acquired the force of revelation. Previously the idea of pampering myself meant watching the EastEnders omnibus when I had already seen both episodes in the week. But now it meant inhabiting an aura of solitary voluptuousness, spending whole yummy evenings watching paint dry.
Now, the interesting thing about nail polish is that it comes without instructions. Did you know this? This was my first setback, really, and it was one from which I never properly recovered. The other interesting thing is that nail polish remover, if you splash it about too liberally, removes polish quite indiscriminately – from your best sandals, for example, and your chest of drawers. Also, it is not a good idea to put used cotton buds, soaked with nail polish remover, directly on a mahogany dining table, because not only does the surface mysteriously acquire pits and scars, but the lacerations have white hair growing out of them, which won’t come off again, ever.
Within minutes of starting my new regime, I had run up damages to an approximate replacement value of twelve hundred pounds. But I was not down-hearted. I had applied a transparent goo of base-coat to all of my fingernails (including the right-hand ones, which were tricky) and was now ready to drink sherbet, eat Turkish delight, and watch an American mini-series until the next stage. ‘I’m strictly a female female,’ I sang, ‘Da da dum di da Dum de dee.’ I picked up the remote control from the carpet and was surprised to discover that a layer of speckled gunk had attached itself to all the nails that had come in contact with the floor. Spit. Peering at the other hand (which looked OK), I cautiously tapped all the nails with a finger to check they were dry. They weren’t.
Three hours later my fifth attempt at a base-coat was almost dry, but I was feeling strangely detached from my surroundings, because I had just spent a whole evening not using my fingers. Every impulse to pick up a tissue, or stroke the cat, or wipe hair from my eyes had been followed once (with disastrous results) and thereafter strenuously denied. At one point, the phone had rung, and after a period of whimpering with indecision I had answered it by picking up the receiver between my elbows and then dropping it on the desk, in a manner reminiscent of thriller heroines tied to kitchen chairs. ‘Hello?’ it said faintly from the desktop. ‘Help!’ I yelled, kneeling beside the receiver, and waggling my fingers like a madwoman. ‘Hello?’ it said again, and went dead.
Eventually I took the whole lot off again, partly because the removal process was the only one I was good at, partly because I realized that novice nail-painting is not something to be attempted alone, after all. It requires the attendance of slaves. I did a swift impression of Lady Macbeth (damned spot, and all that), and went to bed. And there I dreamed of waltzing through bright cosmetics halls, dressed in pink gauze, carrying bags and bags of lovely self-indulgent stuff for getting Ribena stains out of the sofa.
First, there is something I should explain: in May 1968, when the world stage resounded to the lobbing of cobbles in the streets of Paris, I recorded in my personal diary the purchase of a maroon skirt. I make no apology. To me, you see, at twelve years old, this was an événement. Maroon wool, slightly too big, zip at the front, I was proud. Moreover, conscious of the heavy responsibility owed by all diarists to future historians, I thoughtfully taped the price label to the page. ‘Etam,’ it says, ‘£sd: 19/11’. I still have it (the label, not the skirt). It is before me now.
In the intervening years, I have of course laughed at the schoolgirl hubris – fancy preserving an Etam label; did I imagine that the wild-eyed time-capsule people would wrest it from my grasp and bury it along with a copy of the Maastricht treaty for unborn post-nuclear generations to gape and wonder at? Ha ha ha. But now something has happened. The University of Reading has acquired a ‘Centre for Ephemera Studies’, dedicated to the preservation of can labels, leaflets, and all such throwaway stuff. Good grief, my Etam label – someone really wants it. It is like waking up in the cold light of a science fiction novel. Well, do it to Julia, that’s what I say.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to be the University of Reading at the moment. Leaving aside the obvious horror entailed in suddenly finding oneself transmogrified into a red-brick academic institution in the middle of nowhere, tons of old shed-clearings must daily be screeching through the gates by special courier. ‘More bus tickets from well-wishers,’ says the dumper truck driver, as he cheerfully pulls his lever and sends several hundredweight of brown-paper parcels slithering down in a heap. The remit of the centre is to preserve only printed matter, but the chronic hoarders of carpet off-cuts will be much too excited to notice. ‘People throw these bits away, with no sense of heritage, but we have kept these sacks of Cyril Lord for thirty years,’ says the covering letter. ‘Please don’t try returning it to us, we have moved. We hope you find much interest also in the tins of paint.’
But if the university sinks under the weight of empty seed packets and Brillo boxes, it will only serve them right. What a terrible idea, to confer academic respectability on the worst of human failings. Besides, since we feel guilt about having a throwaway culture, for God’s sake let’s have the exhilaration too. Chuck it right away, Kay; sling it in the bin, Vin; take it to the tip, Pip; dump it in the sea, Lee. There must be fifty ways to lose a label. Who cares if the ‘details of our everyday life’ are not remembered for ever? Who do we think we are? This sort of vanity is all right when you are twelve, but let’s snap out of this worship of the design-classic Coke bottle, before it is too late.
It used to be the case tha
t cultural artefacts of all sorts – not just H.P. Sauce labels – were consigned to the dustbin. And it was better, healthier, that way. The old made way for the new. Television programmes were shown, then wiped; films were distributed once; records were released, sold, deleted; nice old buildings were wantonly knocked down; and a collection of old cinema tickets was something that alarmingly dropped out of a shoebox in front of guests, making you flush red, grab your purse, and run away to Sweden. But now the culture has been telescoped, which is why it’s hard to remember what year it is, and why shopping in the Virgin Megastore is such a depressing experience. When a person can still buy Monkees albums in 1993, it reduces her faith in the natural workings of progress.
So here is a rallying call. Let us face forward, dump some big ones, and move on. It needs no ghost of Sigmund Freud to point out that the new discipline of ephemera studies represents anal retention on a vast, global and terrifying scale. Besides, if we carry on like this, there will be no future historians to thank us for the postcard, so it’s all a vainglorious waste of time in any case. By the year 2000, if we are not all dead through millennial terror, economic incompetence, or holy war, I confidently predict we will have disappeared under inundations of books and videos and lovingly preserved Etam labels.
I swore off caviare on Sunday night. The cats took it badly, but I stood firm, and told them they would thank me in the end. Having watched an hour-long Channel 4 documentary about the polluted River Volga and its toxic sturgeon, I sadly added caviare to my mental list of proscribed foods, finding surprisingly little comfort in the thought that I never eat it anyway. According to a current crack-’em-up joke among the Volga fishermen (who admittedly rejoice in a very peculiar sense of humour), even the Kremlin bureaucrats no longer dare to eat the stuff, so I was not over-reacting. Industrial pollutants and agricultural pesticides are poisoning the river to a point where the giant beluga no longer swims gaily in its waters but is reduced to a big stuffed ugly fish in a museum, dusted weekly by a woman in a scarf.
Given that caviare is not a staple food (and that you have to eat quite a lot of it to feel any ill effects), the programme wasn’t exactly alarmist, and I wasn’t exactly alarmed. But my heart sank as I recognized the beginnings of a new idée fixe. The trouble with food scares is that only rarely are they called off; a warning siren wails out the danger, but there is no equivalent to the All Clear. This means that susceptible, obedient people with no minds of their own (like me) still pick up little trays of Welsh lamb in supermarkets and then put them back down again, just wondering in a vague, confused kind of way whether the effect of Chernobyl will wear off in their lifetimes. It is possible to get stuck.
Personally I don’t buy French apples (why, I don’t remember); I don’t buy cat-food marked ‘beef’ (mad cat disease); and I am wary of eggs (Mrs Currie). Making meals is therefore quite difficult, as you can imagine. In fact, if there is ever a scare involving big economy sacks of Maltesers, quite frankly I am done for.
This is mainly a personality failing, obviously. If nobody says stop, I carry on. I reckon I am one of the very few people alive today who understand why a Japanese soldier would still be fighting the Second World War. A couple of years ago I was obliged to forgo my visits to a very pleasant supervised gym just because every time I was given a repetitive exercise (‘Breathe out and pull; breathe in, relax; out and pull, and in, relax’) I found I would obediently repeat it until the tutor checked up on me, regardless of the interval. ‘Done ten of those yet?’ he would enquire, in a kindly tone. ‘Fifty-six,’ I would blurt out, red-faced. I finally gave it up when I realized that he might one day set me going on an exercise and then pop out to post a letter and be run down by a furniture van. In which case I would be left to row an imaginary skiff for the rest of my natural life.
The idea about food scares, presumably, is that you use your own judgement, but without information I don’t understand how it’s done. A fortnight after Chernobyl, do you just decide not to dwell on the nasty idea that contamination lasts thousands of years (or whatever), and choose to make a traditional shepherd’s pie – even if it cooks itself without help and outshines the candlelight on the dining table? ‘Life’s too short,’ you reason (quite aptly, in the circumstances). But isn’t salmonella still rife in the chicken coops, aren’t cattle still waltzing in the pens? They are probably doing a full-scale mazurka by now.
On the caviare front there is less to worry about, obviously. ‘I hope there’s no caviare in this,’ is not something the average attentive cat-owner thinks to herself when doling out the Whiskas. On the other hand, the chances of us hearing that the Volga has been cleaned up (even if it happens) are remarkably slim, so the old Japanese soldier syndrome takes over once again, I’m afraid. ‘Don’t eat the prawns,’ Julie Walters once hissed alarmingly in a Victoria Wood sketch. ‘They tread water at sewage outlets with their mouths open.’ Likewise, from now on I shall raise a skinny warning hand at people in the act of eating caviare canapés, and remind them of the latest unfunny sturgeon jokes from the fisherfolk of the Volga. Either that, of course, or only respond to invitations that promise ‘6pm–9pm, Cocktails and Maltesers’.
According to the first-hand reports, what tends to happen is this. You are lying in a hospital bed, approaching death, and then suddenly you lift out of your body and look down on yourself. This is weird enough to start with, of course; but before your rationality can fully take stock – ‘That’s very odd, me on the ceiling, I expect it was the toasted cheese’ – you are propelled, helpless and at great velocity, along a dark tunnel towards a wonderful welcoming light. No thought of passport, hand-baggage or travellers’ cheques detains you; nor do you slap your hand to your brow with the cry ‘Oh no, I left the iron on.’ Instead, you emerge into a beautiful, timeless, tranquil garden where you feel blissfully happy, and decide to stay for eternity, if not weeks.
Of course you are also dragged away again. Suddenly, with a dreadful finality, you are dropped back in your body, and it’s all over, your vision is fled, you are condemned to life. But you are never the same again. Possibly your experience confirms the notion of life after death, possibly it proves only that imagination is the last thing to go. Whichever way you see it, you have been blessed.
Personally, I have always yearned for an out-of-body-experience. (With a body like mine, so would you.) My only fear was that my idea of paradise is so cheap and materialistic that my tunnel would end, not in the tranquillity of Elysian fields, nor beside still waters, but in a celestial shopping arcade (modelled on Bentalls of Kingston), from which I would return with beany hats and specially printed souvenirs: ‘My sister went to Heaven and all she got me was this lousy T-shirt.’ This sense of personal unworthiness, however, only increases one’s awe at the genuine wonderful thing, and on Sunday I watched BBC1’s Everyman programme about near-death experiences with big round eyes and my mouth open. Even if you don’t believe in Heaven, you can believe in the near-death experience. These people had seen something. They thought it was lovely. It was thirteen years since one woman’s privileged return from the undiscovered country, yet she still had light in her eyes when she spoke about it. In earlier times, these people would have been revered as saints, I thought.
The only puzzle was why nobody mentioned Lewis Carroll. Tunnel, garden, I don’t know, it rings bells. What was mentioned, however, was a miserable wet-blanket scientific theory which suggested in no uncertain terms that the near-death experience is a mere perceptual illusion – something that happens inside the brain when your resistance is low – and that in reality you don’t go anywhere, not even Bentalls, you just think you do. This was a shock, especially since it sounded so plausible. Dr Susan Blackmore, a cheerful academic with a no-nonsense approach and a leaning towards Buddhism, has been researching the phenomenon for years, and what she said, basically, was that your inhibitory cells stop firing, causing masses of excitation. I felt terrible. I sat down. So it was really true, what they told me. Ther
e is no shopping after death.
‘What happened to you back there? We thought we’d lost you!’
‘Oh, it was just some uncontrolled firing in the temporal lobe, silly! The accompanying rush of endorphins (peptide neurotransmitters) just persuaded me I was having a frightfully good time when in fact I wasn’t.’
‘Oh. So it wasn’t like Heaven, then?’
‘Well, in a way it was. I mean, I wore a blue frock and had a pony, which was nice, and there was a treacle well and a pile of comics, but it didn’t mean anything. It was just that my brain had lost its grip on the normal model of reality, and had constructed one from memory and imagination, rather than from the evidence of the senses.’
I suppose the near-death experience never did prove the existence of the immortal soul, but I have to admit I sneakingly thought it did. But that’s all in the past now. What saddens me equally is the thought that if the near-death experience is an illusion, there is no near-life experience either, which leaves a big question-mark hanging over the glassy-eyed travellers of the London Underground. Previously I had supposed they were dead people on spiritual awayday tickets, investigating the joys of the other side. But if they aren’t, then who the hell are they?
The Only Event of Any Importance That Ever Happened to Me
I got stuck in the lift last week. I had been working a bit late, and the lift was waiting innocently at the right floor, so – fool that I was – I thought I’d travel down in it and save on the wear and tear to the support hosiery. The doors closed pretty efficiently, but then nothing else would work: the doors wouldn’t open again, and the lift wouldn’t move. I told myself to breathe deeply, and not panic. Funnily enough, that didn’t work either. The whole of Hancock’s The Lift flashed before my eyes.