No, I defend the prime minister’s position. First, I think there is a moral imperative to buy books, even if you have little time to read them. After all, the authors wrote them in all good faith; why should they be penalized just because you are busy (temporarily) running the country? I grow very cross in bookshops, watching customers dither over fulfilling their obligation. ‘Just buy it, for heaven’s sake!’ I want to say. ‘What’s the big deal? First Lord of the Treasury salary not good enough for you?’ Second, there is no pleasure to compare with a heavy Waterstone’s bag. And third (obviously), if you wait for the exact appropriate moment to buy the exact appropriate book, it will no longer be in print, stupid.
I keep trying to imagine the sort of person whose bookshelves don’t say ‘This is what I’m interested in’ but ‘This is what I’ve read, actually; go on, test me.’ What a miserable way to live your life. I remember once a potential boyfriend (it came to nothing) solemnly inspecting my bookshelves as though they were a measure of compatibility, and I thought, lumme, he’ll ask about those German poets, I’m done for. But then he leaned back and said, ‘I see you’ve got M.R. James, Henry James and P.D. James all together here.’ ‘Er, is there a problem?’ I said, nervously. ‘Well, yes,’ he snapped. ‘Alphabetically, Henry should come before M.R. Also, the books should be drawn forward neatly to the extreme edge of the shelves.’ It took me several weeks to realize it, but this reaction said more about him than it did about me.
If M.R. James or Sheridan Le Fanu were alive today, I have no doubt about the particular universal neurosis they would be tapping – terrifying us out of our skins by making a simple story out of our deepest nightmare. The story they would be writing would be called ‘The Newspaper’.
On the staircase of the London Library in St James’s Square, a middle-aged clergyman (his hair prematurely white) would meet by chance a young man with whom he had once shared a railway compartment on a journey to York. After a few pleasantries, they would decide to take tea together, perhaps in Fortnum’s. Only when they had seated themselves comfortably in a quiet corner with some Darjeeling and some dry cake would the clergyman relate – in simple, unsensational prose – his terrible story.
On a summer morning in the year of 198—, he had bought, he says, a Sunday newspaper. After scanning it for church news, he had left it in his conservatory while he pottered peacefully among his roses, stopping occasionally to make a fuss of Theo, his faithful old Labrador. Returning once to the conservatory for an implement – a trowel, let’s say – he had sensed something odd; something not quite as he had left it. But glancing around, he had seen nothing particularly out of the ordinary: perhaps the newspaper, with his spectacles resting on it, had shifted slightly – but no doubt, he reasoned, Theo had been sniffing about. He thought little more of it, and later shut the conservatory door and strolled up the lane to his pretty parish church for Evensong.
Returning later, he thought he heard the dog whimpering. The sound was one he had never heard from Theo before – deep fear was there in that sound. The clergyman, his pulse racing, frantically searched the house for his faithful friend, but only when Theo started to yowl and scratch furiously at the door did he realize that the sound was coming from the conservatory. Tearing open the door, he saw the most terrible sight: the dog, frothing at the mouth, was lying on its side, its red eyes starting out of its head, its old heart having given out at last. And in the corner, the Newspaper, no longer an inoffensive two-section broadsheet, but now an indescribably huge, ugly, monstrous, garish, unnecessary object. In the course of a single day, the Newspaper had grown exponentially, in that poor clergyman’s conservatory, to one hundred times its original size.
The terror of that moment still seized the clergyman, even in the safety of the tea-room. During their modest repast, his fine bone china teacup rattled and danced on its saucer, and though he broke his madeira cake into pieces, never did he raise a morsel to his lips. The Sunday Times had done for him. It has done for us all.
Personally I would be sorry to see it go, that nice busy roundabout outside Buckingham Palace. Last week’s news that the Royal Parks Review Group wants to pedestrianize it for the sake of tourists has come as a blow. Naturally, I can’t fault their humanitarian motives, indeed I can easily picture the escalating woe their research must have induced, as, faces fixed in a rictus of alarm, they kept their St James’s Park vigil, and monitored the near-hits with a regular muffled shriek. ‘I can’t look!’ they squealed, as every ten minutes a clueless foreign tourist, intent on the Palace, ventured halfway across the road from the Victoria Memorial, stopped, blinked for a moment, panicked, flapped his arms, and then at the very last minute vaulted the crash-barrier out of the path of a roaring cab.
But why don’t they look at it from the other point of view? For the average Londoner, this game of high-speed chicken outside a national heritage beauty-spot is one of our very few opportunities to contribute usefully to the tourist industry. It’s our only chance to interact. And it is to our credit, I think, that we do it with such enthusiasm. ‘There’s one!’ we say, dropping down a gear as we sweep round the corner from Birdcage Walk, and accelerate hard. ‘This will give them something to write home about!’ And quite honestly, the tourists do seem to appreciate it, especially when we make jolly local hand-gestures at them through the windscreens and shout ‘Yah, turkeys!’ as we thunder past. Safely arrived at the railings, they giggle red-faced from the chase, pant with pleasure, and sometimes even clutch their chestal area as testimony to the excitement. Which means that the gratified motorist can speed off up Constitution Hill to Hyde Park Corner with the pleasant satisfaction of a job well done.
Pave it over, make a namby-pamby promenade, and this precious interaction will most certainly be lost. But not only that; it will also give tourists the wrong impression of our lovely city, in which dangerous jay-walking is surely one of the chief means of expressing individuality and free will. ‘I am going to cross this road now, though hell should bar the way!’ we declare stoutly, as we stride out into four lanes of traffic, misjudge the speed of an oncoming motorbike, and pretend not to hear what’s shouted at us as it swerves and skids to a halt at the lights, just twenty yards down the road. Traffic dodging is part of the metropolitan experience, for goodness’ sake, it’s part of being British.
What’s the point of coming to London if you never expose yourself to the fear of being run over? You might as well stay at home and knit fjords, or whatever it is that foreigners do. Our high pedestrian accident rate should be made a glowing feature of tourism campaigns, not swept under the carpet. Look at it in a positive light, and these foreigners are returning to their homes equipped with a life skill they could not possibly acquire anywhere else outside the Third World.
No, if London’s tourists deserve sympathy, it’s for other things. The place is expensive and unfriendly, you can’t get a coffee after half past five, London airport is curiously nowhere near London, and as for linguistic proficiency, well, let’s just say our spoken English needs work. But since we don’t make strenuous efforts to protect our honoured visitors from anything else in this hostile, uncomfortable culture, it is definitely a bit peculiar to want to save them from the cars. I mean, good grief, let’s not get xenophobic here, but they do make these cars, you know. We only buy them and then drive in a reckless manner, as God intended.
So let’s stop pussyfooting around. Leave that roundabout precisely where it is, with the traffic going clockwise to confuse the foreigners. After all, it could well be true that for every Japanese or German car squealing round and round the Victoria Memorial, sufficient funds flow back into the Japanese or German national kitty for several lucky people to pack a suitcase, fly to London, run across the road outside Buckingham Palace, and be almost knocked down. And if that’s not a circular irony, then I don’t know what is.
Should you ever feel the urge to see where Jim Morrison is buried (Jim Morrison of the Doors, d. 1971), I now feel pretty c
onfident I can guide you to the spot. Prior to last weekend, I had only the vaguest idea that Morrison was interred somewhere in France; but now, having navigated a friend around the famous Parisian cemetery of Père-Lachaise (‘Next stop Balzac, this way, step along’), I am an authority on Morrison’s precise whereabouts, despite having no personal interest in him whatsoever. People just kept asking us, that’s all, because we had a map. ‘Jim Morrison?’ they enquired earnestly, these young Italian girls with rucksacks and brown legs, born circa 1975. ‘Er, oh yes, down here, turn right, follow the crowd,’ we said, mystified.
It seemed a bit peculiar, all this fuss. My friend and I appeared to be missing the point of Père-Lachaise, getting excited about Rossini and Colette, when we obviously should have been focusing our dilated eyeballs to scrawl, ‘We miss you JIM, where are you JIM, are you dead then JIM’ on the side of somebody else’s tomb abutting the mighty Morrison’s. What terrible luck for those bourgeois Parisian families, incidentally, who found themselves slap-bang next to a blown-out Sixties youth icon. No chance of resting in peace. An American couple asked us near the gate who was buried in Père-Lachaise. ‘Who isn’t?’ we exclaimed, jabbing wildly at our map. ‘No, look, Proust, Bizet, Géricault’ (no response); ‘Er, Chopin, Modigliani, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Jim Morrison –’ ‘Really? Jim Morrison?’ they interrupted. And they went off happy. We could see they were impressed.
But as we continued our tour of this starry necropolis, sadly taking note of the fact that devotees of A la Recherche had failed to write, ‘I can’t live without you MARCEL, Come back MARCEL, This is what happens when you go out MARCEL’ on the grave of Proust, I suppose we should have realized that Jim Morrison, for all his paucity of talent or achievement, really is the point of Père-Lachaise. What does it matter that Proust is here? He is only where he ought to be. In any cemetery, the deepest sentiment is rightly reserved for the exile or itinerant who happened to step on a bee in an unlikely place, and got buried before anyone noticed. For the best effect, Proust should be in Florida. ‘No no MARCEL’ we would write. ‘Whatever possessed you MARCEL.’
I speak as someone who has wept openly at the Keats-Shelley memorial in Rome, has stood bereft at the tomb of Henry Fielding in Lisbon, but who visits Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey dry-eyed and impervious. It is the sorry truth: the sight of a hero properly interred in his own country is rarely an occasion for a Kleenex, whereas the idea of poor Fielding, one of England’s greatest (and most English) writers, embarking for Lisbon in 1754, arriving there, loathing it, and dying in just a few weeks, is somehow heartbreaking. Furthermore, it adds to the touching romance of the thing that his monument is nowadays difficult to find. I remember asking a bemused Portuguese leaf-sweeper for directions, and he clearly had no idea what I was driving at – even when I helpfully mimed scenes from the movie of Tom Jones.
All this has been much on my mind because, two or three weeks from now, I hope to stand on a hilltop in Western Samoa looking at the tomb of Robert Louis Stevenson, on which his famous ‘Requiem’ is engraved.
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie,
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
And, well, pardon me for sniffing, I must have a cold coming on, but why does nobody understand that this is intensely moving? They understand about Jim Morrison, but ‘Stevenson?’ they say, ‘I don’t get it. Surely he invented the Rocket and that was that.’ Clearly I’ve got a big job ahead of me, scrawling, ‘All right LOUIS, It’s your centenary soon LOUIS, They are hoping to do a commemorative stamp LOUIS.’ But it really shouldn’t be necessary, when the poem says it all:
This be the verse you grave for me,
Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
I bet JIM wishes he’d thought of that.
Crackers Already
If the build-up to Christmas is depressing for no other reason, it is because Ambridge is annually gripped by showbiz fever. Rural readers will no doubt assure me that English village life in Advent really is abuzz with pantomime rehearsals and sheet-music distribution, and I suppose I will have to believe it. But the thought of Jill Archer efficiently running up yet another dozen chorus-line costumes on her Singer treadle, of Bert Fry practising his basso profundo in the byre, of Linda Snell bustling importantly with clipboard and Tiggy-whistle, makes me shake my head with genuine sadness. There are several reasons. First, it is essentially the same story every time (although this year, admittedly, the panto has been cancelled in favour of the even duller concert); second, the annual repetition reminds me of my own mortality; third, I don’t believe in this universal urge to leap on stage in a funny suit; and fourth, it gives me the shuddering Christmassy ab-dabs to think of the lights going up after the show each year to reveal a silent audience of – what?
Much has been made of the popular ‘unheard’ characters in The Archers – such people as Higgs, Shane and Pru Forrest, who neatly contrive to pop out suddenly (‘He was here a minute ago –’) to check the Bentley, the quiche, or the victoria sponge, and so avoid contact with the listening public. But only at Christmas does one become powerfully aware of the Ambridge plebs – that mob of mute, unnamed, disenfranchised villagers who must surely constitute the bums on seats for each miserably jolly extravaganza the Ambridge nobs can dream up for their delectation. Who are they, these faceless inferiors? What does it feel like to be valued only for one’s bum? The rest of the year, they patronize the village shop, use the services of the doctor and vet, buy pints of Shires in the Bull, and take early morning swims at the Grey Gables health club – and presumably don’t feel particularly second-class or invisible. But at Christmas, as they shuffle into that village hall, sit down and open their programmes, their wraith-like howls of bitter dismay must be audible all the way to Borchester.
I was put in mind of these non-people when reading yesterday of the nine-year-old Shetland schoolgirl whose mother is keeping her at home because of a disagreement with the head teacher. Nothing remarkable in that, you might think, until you discover that the girl (poor thing) is the real-life equivalent of the Ambridge nobs. If this school has a panto, she stars in it automatically. If it has a hockey team, she is its captain and goalie. And if there is a maths test she sets the standard. She is, in short, the only child at the school; and no wonder she is having problems. Other children can stand at the back when netball teams are picked; they can bend down and tie up their shoelaces. Not this girl. For her, there is no hiding place; she is forever in the spotlight. And every time the English teacher says, ‘Now who’s going to read aloud this morning?’, she is obliged resignedly to raise her hand, otherwise the whole pedagogic caboodle crumbles instantly to dust. On speech day, when she wins all the prizes but nobody claps, she must dearly wish for another life.
Where the intense weirdness comes in, however, is that initially she was sent home for misbehaviour – a very strange case of pour encourager les autres. Sometimes she must dream of classmates – of skipping while other people turn the rope, of marble games in which you lose the yellow one and go home crying, of rough children pushing you into a hedge for no reason – just as Phil Archer must sometimes think that in a place like Ambridge there must be some other muggins who can play the joanna. But at least she knows that having been sent home, she is not the subject of a whispering campaign. One just wonders whether her head teacher, having evidently lost his patience with the girl and said, ‘You! Trouble-maker! Out!’, really felt much better when she’d obeyed, shrugged and gone home. Is the school running more smoothly now? Do the nativity play rehearsals progress without incident? In this Shetland school, as in Ambridge, I suspect you may eavesdrop on the festivities this year, and hear the famous eerie sound of one hand clapping.
The announcement of the Princess of Wales’s controversial Christmas holiday plans contained
an important sub-text, I thought, which somehow got ignored in the usual flurry of pecking and stripping to the bone when the vultures descended. ‘You are blind!’ I shouted at nobody in particular, as I pawed through my heap of tabloids. I mean, of course, yes, Diana’s decision to spend Christmas away from the royal in-laws has ‘fuelled speculation’ (yawn). And yes, too, it has encouraged sentimental visions of Christmas Future at Sandringham, with the royal family casting sad-eyed Cratchit-like glances at the forlorn little wooden stool on which the princess formerly sat. But in the rush for that 4-star speculation-fuel, nobody noticed that in terms of universal yuletide family politics, Diana had achieved a tremendous coup. She had really caught them on the hop. To announce your Christmas plans in the first week of November is the mark of a brilliant tactician, family-wise. They can’t possibly have been prepared for it. What she did was the equivalent of winning the race while her competitors were still indoors lacing up their plimsolls.
Christmas is an awful thing, in my book. Ding Dong Merrily has little to do with it; and there is a limit to the number of times you can pretend not to know the ending of Superman II. Sometimes I sit back and imagine that Christmas will really be cancelled this year, and the idea fills me with excitement. So I envy the princess her determined effort to avoid the tidal pull of the family Christmas, and I would emulate her like a shot (‘Off to Morocco, sorry!’) if I did not suffer currently from ‘denial’. You know that you can be ‘in denial’ about bereavement or alcoholism? Well, I have a theory that you can also be ‘in denial’ about Christmas, which makes it ultimately more dangerous.