Going forward...
I step into a crowded compartment on the North London Line and a young man and young woman , as if in competition, both jump up straight away on seeing me. Do I really look so old? I no longer have to prove at arty afternoon cinemas that I’m ‘concessionary.’ The more mainstream cinemas I now avoid after mistakenly taking a 14 year old as a treat to see ‘Batman Begins.’ It was like a bear garden, kids milling around. As a former teacher I wanted to discipline the place, while my charge, undisturbed, sat happily enjoying the film. A few years before I renounced big multiplexes, I turned up at a cinema which announces it’s ‘fanatical about film’ (really?) for an afternoon show of ‘Billy Elliot’. The adverts were on: deafening. I went outside into the foyer to complain, ‘I can’t listen to a film at that volume,’ and some cheerful young assistant said, ‘No, we turn it down a bit for the film itself. But it’s mainly pensioners in the afternoon. They like it loud.’ I wasn’t – then - a pensioner – though might as well have been. Coming back from France during that same period, in the queue for the catamaran (now long defunct), I got out of the car and started (as I thought) chatting up a young-ish man I liked the look of. ‘Are you retired over here?’ he asked.
These observations are – I hope – an attempt to get curmudgeonliness (spell check doesn’t like it) out of my system. In the previous essay I see the phrase ‘in my day’ has crept in. I’m not aware of ever using it before, and remember in the Yorkshire village where I once lived, old Joe Clarkson, the father of my next door neighbour, a gentle man (in contrast to his famous grandson, Jeremy) saying, ‘Oh, happy days…’ I’d be a bit less than thirty at the time and, theoretically, knew what he meant. I’m now sloshed with nostalgia and regret – in ‘Pass It On,’ I notice, for distant racecourses, more country track than corporate, and in ‘Impure Drama’ for less genre – or crime drama, at least. 'Peaceful Piccadilly' is pure nostalgia. Joe Clarkson back in the Seventies was thinking of the happier days of his youth– when? Pre War? (Rickets? Scarlet fever? TB? ‘Thou talkst of things dying. I of things new born’ ’Twas ever thus – and I was the young man then.
I also notice a crustiness about language. I must remember how pleased I was thirty or forty years ago that the word ‘gay’ sneaked in, supplanting its previous usage - ‘blithe’ - despite bitter, persistent complaints from the old brigade. But my present aim is letting off steam – and, indeed, let’s start with Network Rail. ‘We are now approaching into Ashford’ (is recent NR speak, to accompany the now time honoured, ‘Please take all your personal belongings with you,’ which makes me laugh when I hear it. Why the adjective? What are impersonal belongings? It joins ‘personal friend’ as linguistic litter.)
‘So’ (I allude to it in the previous essay) is all over place now, not used in the sense of ‘as a consequence,’ but as an interviewee’s way of appropriating the conversation: ‘my turn now.’ It is probably meant to indicate that the person knows his onions. I can’t take the speaker seriously, and switch off in my head. If ‘So’ now, unnecessarily, begins a speech, ‘going forward’ now finishes it. There’s more excuse for that one, admittedly. ‘Subsequent/ly’?? ‘In the future’?? It’s the bogus ‘professional’ tinge about ‘going forward’ turns me off – it's best left to football pundits and managers. But I can see the battle’s lost, as with ‘pro-active,’ which I once heard a judge – Lord Justice Henry - chivvy a Q.C. for using. It will, no doubt, linger. Maybe I should have been a pedantic judge?
Kids (this distresses me) now say ‘like’ all the time – sometimes to the exclusion of almost any other word in the sentence, ‘up speaking,’ with it. I can’t up-speak. I’ve tried. Every now and again, used sparingly, it can add a bit of variety but it’s all so tentative, as if the speaker’s terrified of being definite. Shape up! You even hear foreign students using ‘like,’ as if it’s Chapter Four of their English Grammar syllabus. Gosh, how much they must want to fit in with their English speaking peers. Be sticklers! Stand out!
Emojis (may have misspelt) we’ll pass by quickly. Don’t use them. Can see their point in preventing misunderstanding. One of my ex-students, who contacted me lately (I taught him English and am fond) sticks ‘ha ha’ at the end of most sentences. But, on the evidence of his smart phone use, he’s probably at home with the internet, which I’m not. My phone takes pictures, does text, and – oh, yes, you can speak into it, but that’s it. A young friend of mine once tried to ‘touch’ one of my little pics to make it bigger (or move it along). ‘I said, ‘It doesn’t do that, Nancy.’ Nancy is a singer. She was at the Barbican lately. I had to ask her to book the ticket for me on line. Another kind friend of mine books train and ferry tickets for me. I am not on line. I refuse to be on line. I lose money by not being on line. When a jolly message to the planet like this is ready, I take my memory stick to the attractive modern Library and Museum (named, rather cheerily, ‘The Beaney’) just round the corner – which has the advantage of getting me out of the house. I sit at a bank of screens with folk I wouldn’t normally take much notice of, some, it has to be said, distinctly odd - don’t know what they make of me; they come in the category Mrs. Thatcher described as people who travel on buses. I press in my library and pin number, wait for the thing to warm up (generally going a long wander while it does so) then wing my thoughts to my friend, WebMeister Hugh, who does the rest. Sometimes, as a treat, I call in his office and watch him at work, posting and pasting my golden words (and pics) between his two Visa Vision screens, and I think of Dame Edna’s cry of despair with Melvyn Bragg’s very many novels, ‘Melvyn, we’ll never catch up.’ And Melvyn was young and almost implausibly handsome for such a brain once and Dame Edna, suited like a country squire when I met her in the flesh, has long retired. But there I am, name dropping again – please regard them as recognisable pegs to hold onto in what we’ll laughingly call a narrative.
I went to a garden centre yesterday, and enjoyed it. Is this age related? Probably. I have acquired a garden, and have developed a new relationship with snails, little creatures I have hitherto admired (slow and steady, the way I see myself). In between my picking up these bastards and chucking them over the fence for them to enjoy a new life in the Curzon Cinema carpark, and because I’m not as fit and flexible as I was, I also enjoy taking a break from gardening, looking at the holes in the hosta where the snail has been, while consoling myself with a gin and tonic - or gin and orange (‘getting your Vitamin C’ as my doctor pal says ). In my youth – the last time I drank gin – I enjoyed gin and French, which I’m keeping off for the moment even though (well, because) it has the advantage of being double alcohol. The Queen Mother was patron of my old college, and on her annual visits, the President of the College was instructed to prepare his royal visitor a very large gin and vermouth. And then to be ready with a second. College photographs show her emerging from the President’s Lodge, smiling and waving, absolutely ‘radiant.’
I work in the early morning (no one around, well before the kids start heading to school) and will have a drink before lunchtime if I feel like it, my excuse being that it’s easily midday by most people’s body clocks (or it’s midday French time). And I don’t drink in the evenings, unless out somewhere (which I’m not very often these days). Boozing after six messes up my sleep (you wake because your body craves the glucose, apparently). I go to bed so early, try to stay awake but inevitably drop off to Radio 4’s ‘The Word Tonight’ (a programme, a wit said, ‘where the Prime Minister could resign and his secret would be safe from Fleet Street till morning). I listen to the World Service early mornings. There's too much news and discussion these days, I find. What I really want is half an hour on the private life of the bee or fish farming in North Equatorial Africa. I’m happier when twenty past five arrives and Radio 4 kicks in with the familiar trawl round these shores of the Shipping Forecast, and then a digest of early morning news, news papers and sports summary, all wrapped up in ten minutes. This is so much just the job for me it which means they’ll ‘refresh the format’ soon (see below). I then get up, creaking a bit, but not too bad (it will get worse) to bring a cup of tea back to bed (of which I am the sole occupant – mularkey a distant memory). ‘Tweet of the Day’ I like, though sometimes can’t hear the tweets. There’s a silence and then David Attenborough says, ‘That was the sound of the lesser spotted grebe’. I don’t think the grebe’s at fault, or my hearing. It’s something to do with the frequency of my radio. So I imagine the sounds. They’ve altered the format of ‘TOTD’ lately, and I’m dubious. (I sent a short, rather insulting e mail – one of the pleasures of curmudgeonliness, and I'm older than him - to the BBC's DG, Lord Hall, on another matter recently, about changes to Radio 4’s arts coverage, and got a long and polite reply from a minion which didn’t manage to address my point that his boss was ruining my Saturday nights in axing ‘by some way the most intelligent programme on the network. It’s like taking down the Sistine Ceiling’: ‘Saturday Review.’ Hall has a background in opera, for god’s sake. There was a hint in the minion’s reply of budgetary ‘considerations.’ Within a day or so another message popped up: ‘How did we do?’: some commercial outfit employed by the BBC to monitor their handling of complaints. ‘Would I take 10 minutes to…?’ No budgetary constraints with non-programme managerial, needless to say). But there we are: I have become Mr Angry of Canterbury West, my inner Stephen released, aged 70.
But I’m enjoying life (what’s left) at the moment. Workmen have been popping in and out of this house lately– including, from British Gas, the beautiful Glenn (double n), and Lee (as I thought till I saw his signature on the work sheet, still lovingly retained on my kitchen noticeboard: it’s ‘Leigh,’ in fact). ‘Glenn (or Leigh), I know you’ve only come to look at the boiler/drain the system, but how do you feel about living with me full time?’ I’m forty years older than them, but have always fancied handsome capable types. It cheers me. ‘Pathetic’ as my oldest, long married friend will no doubt say. Stephen says: ‘Life Old Dog.Yet’. But these lads are interchangeable. Next week I go up to Cambridge for a couple of weeks to reacquaint myself with the nice looking butcher (sharp haircut, excellent meat) in the precinct near the house I’m ‘sitting’: ‘Can I take you away from all this?’ A vague randiness, in short, happily continues, like the warmth you get from some unexpected underfloor heating. A few years ago, I managed to get my rather hopeless yearnings (velleity is the word) into some artistic shape, and am pleased to say, the BBC received a complaint from a listener as a result. The objection was to the last speech of the play (‘A Dose of Fame’ available on the Listen section). It’s about E.M Forster - Morgan to his friends. He’s arguing with his current (hopeless) object of affection, Masood, about his novel ‘Maurice’:
That’s my 'love' life in a nutshell. A lot of yearning. I read this morning that's there's a German word Sehnsucht – no English equivalent – which means 'the longing for something.' I like the feeling: it's a big part of my make up. It has Romantic and mystical associations, I note. But let's leave that and return to the the Cambridge butcher. He and the others are a daily reminder that my days of unpunctual adventures are over. I haven’t mentioned that my first two waking hours are spent going for several long pees, my first action on waking (at four-ish) is to take a diuretic – the heart not pumping enough to get urine out of my system. And things definitely aren’t as lively down there, in general (or even specifically). So I’ve rather given up on what Alan Bennett’s mother called ‘the bed department,’ I’ll hold on to a bit of yearning though – if the thought police don’t mind - and ‘age inappropriate’ fantasy. I’ve a note in one of my commonplace books about the great Thomas Mann, when about my age, writing that he’d trade all his fame and renown for a glance from a good looking waiter. He may have meant more than a glance; possibly something got lost in translation. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ Is that the line? I – otherwise - can’t stand Dylan Thomas. (‘To begin at the beginning,’ intones Richard Burton, in an extract that pops up all too frequently on the radio, and I yell, ‘No, start much, much further in.’) But he joins a growing list, another of the pleasures of old age. Let's name a few unknowing recipients of this vitriol...
Esther Rantzen (conspicuously compassionate) was also cheerfully disliked – he never gave a reason – by my old friend, Simon Hoggart (see ‘The Wili Si’). I've come to dislike the sanctified David Bowie (how can you take someone seriously who called his son Zowie Bowie?). Victoria Beckham O.M. (give us something else than a pout, sweetheart). David Beckham (mealy mouthed (in public)/ married to Victoria/ tattooed). Fiona Bruce (no noticeable tattoos but made up like Queen Nefertiti/glows while ‘hosting’ royal weddings). Charles Windsor (pampered - 114 domestic staff – agonised. Put him out of his misery). Sir ('dead cat bounce') Michael Fallon is a total twat (or prick we'd better say for balance). But I don't need to be so scrupulous or specific. I'm also inclined against anyone called Tamsin (apart from Tamsin Gregg) Or Thomasina, Or Petronella. Girls called Jack. Stephen Fry (brain the size of Kent, unctuous, ubiquitous/friend of Charles Windsor) and have you noticed how the Middleton sisters don’t marry social workers? Then there’s that insidious woman at EE who tells me I have voice mail. I’ll just add, while at it, that I’d pay a hundred pounds not to see any Andrew Lloyd Webber musical - even more if it was ‘Cats.’ (Woody Allen has a great line about, ‘I’d do it all again, except for seeing “The Magus”.) Philip Larkin – top curmudgeon/wrote good poems too (‘Deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth’) describes, in a letter, sitting through a reading by the craggy, leather jacketed Ted Hughes, ‘looking like a fucking Easter Island statue.’ And I’m already seven years on in the curmudgeon stakes from England’s best known Librarian. Has anyone written a better poem about the approach of death than ‘Aubade’?
I’ve been counting. Like the Queen I’m on my 13th Prime Minister. (‘Who’s the Prime Minister, Stephen?’ – I’m less interested with each successive one and loathe this latet, at towards the end of this Election campaign, in a way I didn't when it started) ) I do keep up, rather assiduously, with the news (unless it's F. Bruce grinning) but it’s punctuation through the day – and find, inevitable, really at 70, that what goes round comes round. (Why, of all the news bulletins I’ve listened to, do I remember Jim Callaghan being interviewed about the Turks invading Cyprus? Puzzling…). I don’t have a television – haven’t for years and don’t miss it, apart from Wimbledon finals, or the Derby (when I drop into other people’s houses: ‘Hi!’). Having moved, I’ve got one of those letters lately from the TV license people (not the BBC but a commercial outfit - ‘arm?’) that requires me to ring them to say that I haven’t a telly. I regard that as an imposition and look forward to the van arriving, hoping for a Glenn or Leigh enforcer. There’s a subtle moment in Bennett’s (otherwise not very good) film of ‘Lady with a Van’ where the author – is he playing himself?- offers some handsome young workman-type (Russell Tovey) visiting on a job, a cup of coffee ‘before you leave.’ It’s turned down and there’s a flicker of disappointment – a moment, no more – on the writer’s face. Well done, Bennett.
And just now – literally! - parties of French/Dutch /German teenagers are passing by, outside the window, ‘chattering away like birds,’ as my old friend Nina Bawden used to say, and maybe littering their sentences with ‘like.’ Is there an equivalent: ‘Comme’ or ’Wie’? (I’ve since checked - with a young Frenchman who was standing , not at all occupied, advertising river tours here in Canterbury. I didn’t know he was French, at first thought he was Irish – my initial inquiry being about how far the river reached (all the way to Rochester, apparently). The French don’t have the equivalent of ‘like,’ he told me, though do overuse ‘eh, puis’. He speaks English with an Irish accent, having spent a couple of years in Cork, where he says (eyebrows raised, fondly), Irish youth use ‘like’ all the time, as well as - and even more freely than the English - ‘fuck’ and derivatives.
The Frenchman, Quentin – day job is training to be an osteopath – attracts me, needless to say. Would we be having such a lengthy, informative, conversation if I wasn’t mildly entranced, not least by that French/Irish accent? We talk of Macron and his wife, twenty five years older than the new President. I’m, what, forty five years older than this young European (he also lived for seven years, as a child, in Germany). Robbed of all his possessions on a visit to Ireland, he got stuck – penniless – for a time and remained in West Cork for two and a half years. ‘Whoever did me over’ (he has the jargon) ‘changed my life.’ I’d like to hear more, but it’s ‘appropriate’ to move on.
Thomas Hardy – even older than me – fell for much younger women. And writing about him (‘What I think of My Husband’) made me realise – I was just turning 60 as I wrote it - that age is as intense an experience as youth. My old friend, Nina, the novelist, a generation ahead of me, knew - evinced - that. She was pulled out of the Potters Bar rail crash, her husband killed in the seat beside her. She lingered, reduced (from a brilliant level) for ten years, wishing every day - no messing about with her - that she hadn’t been rescued, her love for Austen so strong. I saw a lot of Nina through her years of widowhood (have written about it in the essay called ‘Nina’). She was frail but still fierce, clever, elegant, wicked, contradictory. I once caught her looking, over a busy supper table, at the man who saved her, a fellow passenger, a really decent RAF officer, heroic that day. The look she gave him wasn’t one of gratitude; I’ve never forgotten it. I’m now trying to finish the novel Nina was writing before she died. She’d talk to me about it sometimes: ‘It’s a comedy about a man called Freddie, in his dotage, with irritable bowel syndrome…’ Well, this essay has long escaped its moorings, I think. No irritable bowel syndrome (as yet) but that’s something else that awaits – going forward.
15 May 2017
These observations are – I hope – an attempt to get curmudgeonliness (spell check doesn’t like it) out of my system. In the previous essay I see the phrase ‘in my day’ has crept in. I’m not aware of ever using it before, and remember in the Yorkshire village where I once lived, old Joe Clarkson, the father of my next door neighbour, a gentle man (in contrast to his famous grandson, Jeremy) saying, ‘Oh, happy days…’ I’d be a bit less than thirty at the time and, theoretically, knew what he meant. I’m now sloshed with nostalgia and regret – in ‘Pass It On,’ I notice, for distant racecourses, more country track than corporate, and in ‘Impure Drama’ for less genre – or crime drama, at least. 'Peaceful Piccadilly' is pure nostalgia. Joe Clarkson back in the Seventies was thinking of the happier days of his youth– when? Pre War? (Rickets? Scarlet fever? TB? ‘Thou talkst of things dying. I of things new born’ ’Twas ever thus – and I was the young man then.
I also notice a crustiness about language. I must remember how pleased I was thirty or forty years ago that the word ‘gay’ sneaked in, supplanting its previous usage - ‘blithe’ - despite bitter, persistent complaints from the old brigade. But my present aim is letting off steam – and, indeed, let’s start with Network Rail. ‘We are now approaching into Ashford’ (is recent NR speak, to accompany the now time honoured, ‘Please take all your personal belongings with you,’ which makes me laugh when I hear it. Why the adjective? What are impersonal belongings? It joins ‘personal friend’ as linguistic litter.)
‘So’ (I allude to it in the previous essay) is all over place now, not used in the sense of ‘as a consequence,’ but as an interviewee’s way of appropriating the conversation: ‘my turn now.’ It is probably meant to indicate that the person knows his onions. I can’t take the speaker seriously, and switch off in my head. If ‘So’ now, unnecessarily, begins a speech, ‘going forward’ now finishes it. There’s more excuse for that one, admittedly. ‘Subsequent/ly’?? ‘In the future’?? It’s the bogus ‘professional’ tinge about ‘going forward’ turns me off – it's best left to football pundits and managers. But I can see the battle’s lost, as with ‘pro-active,’ which I once heard a judge – Lord Justice Henry - chivvy a Q.C. for using. It will, no doubt, linger. Maybe I should have been a pedantic judge?
Kids (this distresses me) now say ‘like’ all the time – sometimes to the exclusion of almost any other word in the sentence, ‘up speaking,’ with it. I can’t up-speak. I’ve tried. Every now and again, used sparingly, it can add a bit of variety but it’s all so tentative, as if the speaker’s terrified of being definite. Shape up! You even hear foreign students using ‘like,’ as if it’s Chapter Four of their English Grammar syllabus. Gosh, how much they must want to fit in with their English speaking peers. Be sticklers! Stand out!
Emojis (may have misspelt) we’ll pass by quickly. Don’t use them. Can see their point in preventing misunderstanding. One of my ex-students, who contacted me lately (I taught him English and am fond) sticks ‘ha ha’ at the end of most sentences. But, on the evidence of his smart phone use, he’s probably at home with the internet, which I’m not. My phone takes pictures, does text, and – oh, yes, you can speak into it, but that’s it. A young friend of mine once tried to ‘touch’ one of my little pics to make it bigger (or move it along). ‘I said, ‘It doesn’t do that, Nancy.’ Nancy is a singer. She was at the Barbican lately. I had to ask her to book the ticket for me on line. Another kind friend of mine books train and ferry tickets for me. I am not on line. I refuse to be on line. I lose money by not being on line. When a jolly message to the planet like this is ready, I take my memory stick to the attractive modern Library and Museum (named, rather cheerily, ‘The Beaney’) just round the corner – which has the advantage of getting me out of the house. I sit at a bank of screens with folk I wouldn’t normally take much notice of, some, it has to be said, distinctly odd - don’t know what they make of me; they come in the category Mrs. Thatcher described as people who travel on buses. I press in my library and pin number, wait for the thing to warm up (generally going a long wander while it does so) then wing my thoughts to my friend, WebMeister Hugh, who does the rest. Sometimes, as a treat, I call in his office and watch him at work, posting and pasting my golden words (and pics) between his two Visa Vision screens, and I think of Dame Edna’s cry of despair with Melvyn Bragg’s very many novels, ‘Melvyn, we’ll never catch up.’ And Melvyn was young and almost implausibly handsome for such a brain once and Dame Edna, suited like a country squire when I met her in the flesh, has long retired. But there I am, name dropping again – please regard them as recognisable pegs to hold onto in what we’ll laughingly call a narrative.
I went to a garden centre yesterday, and enjoyed it. Is this age related? Probably. I have acquired a garden, and have developed a new relationship with snails, little creatures I have hitherto admired (slow and steady, the way I see myself). In between my picking up these bastards and chucking them over the fence for them to enjoy a new life in the Curzon Cinema carpark, and because I’m not as fit and flexible as I was, I also enjoy taking a break from gardening, looking at the holes in the hosta where the snail has been, while consoling myself with a gin and tonic - or gin and orange (‘getting your Vitamin C’ as my doctor pal says ). In my youth – the last time I drank gin – I enjoyed gin and French, which I’m keeping off for the moment even though (well, because) it has the advantage of being double alcohol. The Queen Mother was patron of my old college, and on her annual visits, the President of the College was instructed to prepare his royal visitor a very large gin and vermouth. And then to be ready with a second. College photographs show her emerging from the President’s Lodge, smiling and waving, absolutely ‘radiant.’
I work in the early morning (no one around, well before the kids start heading to school) and will have a drink before lunchtime if I feel like it, my excuse being that it’s easily midday by most people’s body clocks (or it’s midday French time). And I don’t drink in the evenings, unless out somewhere (which I’m not very often these days). Boozing after six messes up my sleep (you wake because your body craves the glucose, apparently). I go to bed so early, try to stay awake but inevitably drop off to Radio 4’s ‘The Word Tonight’ (a programme, a wit said, ‘where the Prime Minister could resign and his secret would be safe from Fleet Street till morning). I listen to the World Service early mornings. There's too much news and discussion these days, I find. What I really want is half an hour on the private life of the bee or fish farming in North Equatorial Africa. I’m happier when twenty past five arrives and Radio 4 kicks in with the familiar trawl round these shores of the Shipping Forecast, and then a digest of early morning news, news papers and sports summary, all wrapped up in ten minutes. This is so much just the job for me it which means they’ll ‘refresh the format’ soon (see below). I then get up, creaking a bit, but not too bad (it will get worse) to bring a cup of tea back to bed (of which I am the sole occupant – mularkey a distant memory). ‘Tweet of the Day’ I like, though sometimes can’t hear the tweets. There’s a silence and then David Attenborough says, ‘That was the sound of the lesser spotted grebe’. I don’t think the grebe’s at fault, or my hearing. It’s something to do with the frequency of my radio. So I imagine the sounds. They’ve altered the format of ‘TOTD’ lately, and I’m dubious. (I sent a short, rather insulting e mail – one of the pleasures of curmudgeonliness, and I'm older than him - to the BBC's DG, Lord Hall, on another matter recently, about changes to Radio 4’s arts coverage, and got a long and polite reply from a minion which didn’t manage to address my point that his boss was ruining my Saturday nights in axing ‘by some way the most intelligent programme on the network. It’s like taking down the Sistine Ceiling’: ‘Saturday Review.’ Hall has a background in opera, for god’s sake. There was a hint in the minion’s reply of budgetary ‘considerations.’ Within a day or so another message popped up: ‘How did we do?’: some commercial outfit employed by the BBC to monitor their handling of complaints. ‘Would I take 10 minutes to…?’ No budgetary constraints with non-programme managerial, needless to say). But there we are: I have become Mr Angry of Canterbury West, my inner Stephen released, aged 70.
But I’m enjoying life (what’s left) at the moment. Workmen have been popping in and out of this house lately– including, from British Gas, the beautiful Glenn (double n), and Lee (as I thought till I saw his signature on the work sheet, still lovingly retained on my kitchen noticeboard: it’s ‘Leigh,’ in fact). ‘Glenn (or Leigh), I know you’ve only come to look at the boiler/drain the system, but how do you feel about living with me full time?’ I’m forty years older than them, but have always fancied handsome capable types. It cheers me. ‘Pathetic’ as my oldest, long married friend will no doubt say. Stephen says: ‘Life Old Dog.Yet’. But these lads are interchangeable. Next week I go up to Cambridge for a couple of weeks to reacquaint myself with the nice looking butcher (sharp haircut, excellent meat) in the precinct near the house I’m ‘sitting’: ‘Can I take you away from all this?’ A vague randiness, in short, happily continues, like the warmth you get from some unexpected underfloor heating. A few years ago, I managed to get my rather hopeless yearnings (velleity is the word) into some artistic shape, and am pleased to say, the BBC received a complaint from a listener as a result. The objection was to the last speech of the play (‘A Dose of Fame’ available on the Listen section). It’s about E.M Forster - Morgan to his friends. He’s arguing with his current (hopeless) object of affection, Masood, about his novel ‘Maurice’:
- MORGAN: It will offend. It’s about a young man who can’t love because society won’t let him. His undeveloped heart. I call him Maurice. He’s homosexual and frustrated - there seems no future for him. He thinks of suicide. And then I make him happy ever after in the way that fiction allows. I am determined on that. Two men dragging one another to salvation.
- MASOOD: I think you will find that homosexuality is more of a problem for you in the West than in India.
- MORGAN: Really? Well, I said I was writing it for myself.
- MASOOD: In an ideal heaven, Morgan, you must admit there would be no homosexuality.
- MORGAN: In an ideal heaven, my dear Masood, there would be variety.
Change acoustic. - MORGAN: (V/O) And men could kiss one another in the street if they felt like it. And fumble. And caress. Life never gives us what we want at the moment we consider it appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually. I look forward to some unpunctual adventures.
That’s my 'love' life in a nutshell. A lot of yearning. I read this morning that's there's a German word Sehnsucht – no English equivalent – which means 'the longing for something.' I like the feeling: it's a big part of my make up. It has Romantic and mystical associations, I note. But let's leave that and return to the the Cambridge butcher. He and the others are a daily reminder that my days of unpunctual adventures are over. I haven’t mentioned that my first two waking hours are spent going for several long pees, my first action on waking (at four-ish) is to take a diuretic – the heart not pumping enough to get urine out of my system. And things definitely aren’t as lively down there, in general (or even specifically). So I’ve rather given up on what Alan Bennett’s mother called ‘the bed department,’ I’ll hold on to a bit of yearning though – if the thought police don’t mind - and ‘age inappropriate’ fantasy. I’ve a note in one of my commonplace books about the great Thomas Mann, when about my age, writing that he’d trade all his fame and renown for a glance from a good looking waiter. He may have meant more than a glance; possibly something got lost in translation. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ Is that the line? I – otherwise - can’t stand Dylan Thomas. (‘To begin at the beginning,’ intones Richard Burton, in an extract that pops up all too frequently on the radio, and I yell, ‘No, start much, much further in.’) But he joins a growing list, another of the pleasures of old age. Let's name a few unknowing recipients of this vitriol...
Esther Rantzen (conspicuously compassionate) was also cheerfully disliked – he never gave a reason – by my old friend, Simon Hoggart (see ‘The Wili Si’). I've come to dislike the sanctified David Bowie (how can you take someone seriously who called his son Zowie Bowie?). Victoria Beckham O.M. (give us something else than a pout, sweetheart). David Beckham (mealy mouthed (in public)/ married to Victoria/ tattooed). Fiona Bruce (no noticeable tattoos but made up like Queen Nefertiti/glows while ‘hosting’ royal weddings). Charles Windsor (pampered - 114 domestic staff – agonised. Put him out of his misery). Sir ('dead cat bounce') Michael Fallon is a total twat (or prick we'd better say for balance). But I don't need to be so scrupulous or specific. I'm also inclined against anyone called Tamsin (apart from Tamsin Gregg) Or Thomasina, Or Petronella. Girls called Jack. Stephen Fry (brain the size of Kent, unctuous, ubiquitous/friend of Charles Windsor) and have you noticed how the Middleton sisters don’t marry social workers? Then there’s that insidious woman at EE who tells me I have voice mail. I’ll just add, while at it, that I’d pay a hundred pounds not to see any Andrew Lloyd Webber musical - even more if it was ‘Cats.’ (Woody Allen has a great line about, ‘I’d do it all again, except for seeing “The Magus”.) Philip Larkin – top curmudgeon/wrote good poems too (‘Deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth’) describes, in a letter, sitting through a reading by the craggy, leather jacketed Ted Hughes, ‘looking like a fucking Easter Island statue.’ And I’m already seven years on in the curmudgeon stakes from England’s best known Librarian. Has anyone written a better poem about the approach of death than ‘Aubade’?
I’ve been counting. Like the Queen I’m on my 13th Prime Minister. (‘Who’s the Prime Minister, Stephen?’ – I’m less interested with each successive one and loathe this latet, at towards the end of this Election campaign, in a way I didn't when it started) ) I do keep up, rather assiduously, with the news (unless it's F. Bruce grinning) but it’s punctuation through the day – and find, inevitable, really at 70, that what goes round comes round. (Why, of all the news bulletins I’ve listened to, do I remember Jim Callaghan being interviewed about the Turks invading Cyprus? Puzzling…). I don’t have a television – haven’t for years and don’t miss it, apart from Wimbledon finals, or the Derby (when I drop into other people’s houses: ‘Hi!’). Having moved, I’ve got one of those letters lately from the TV license people (not the BBC but a commercial outfit - ‘arm?’) that requires me to ring them to say that I haven’t a telly. I regard that as an imposition and look forward to the van arriving, hoping for a Glenn or Leigh enforcer. There’s a subtle moment in Bennett’s (otherwise not very good) film of ‘Lady with a Van’ where the author – is he playing himself?- offers some handsome young workman-type (Russell Tovey) visiting on a job, a cup of coffee ‘before you leave.’ It’s turned down and there’s a flicker of disappointment – a moment, no more – on the writer’s face. Well done, Bennett.
And just now – literally! - parties of French/Dutch /German teenagers are passing by, outside the window, ‘chattering away like birds,’ as my old friend Nina Bawden used to say, and maybe littering their sentences with ‘like.’ Is there an equivalent: ‘Comme’ or ’Wie’? (I’ve since checked - with a young Frenchman who was standing , not at all occupied, advertising river tours here in Canterbury. I didn’t know he was French, at first thought he was Irish – my initial inquiry being about how far the river reached (all the way to Rochester, apparently). The French don’t have the equivalent of ‘like,’ he told me, though do overuse ‘eh, puis’. He speaks English with an Irish accent, having spent a couple of years in Cork, where he says (eyebrows raised, fondly), Irish youth use ‘like’ all the time, as well as - and even more freely than the English - ‘fuck’ and derivatives.
The Frenchman, Quentin – day job is training to be an osteopath – attracts me, needless to say. Would we be having such a lengthy, informative, conversation if I wasn’t mildly entranced, not least by that French/Irish accent? We talk of Macron and his wife, twenty five years older than the new President. I’m, what, forty five years older than this young European (he also lived for seven years, as a child, in Germany). Robbed of all his possessions on a visit to Ireland, he got stuck – penniless – for a time and remained in West Cork for two and a half years. ‘Whoever did me over’ (he has the jargon) ‘changed my life.’ I’d like to hear more, but it’s ‘appropriate’ to move on.
Thomas Hardy – even older than me – fell for much younger women. And writing about him (‘What I think of My Husband’) made me realise – I was just turning 60 as I wrote it - that age is as intense an experience as youth. My old friend, Nina, the novelist, a generation ahead of me, knew - evinced - that. She was pulled out of the Potters Bar rail crash, her husband killed in the seat beside her. She lingered, reduced (from a brilliant level) for ten years, wishing every day - no messing about with her - that she hadn’t been rescued, her love for Austen so strong. I saw a lot of Nina through her years of widowhood (have written about it in the essay called ‘Nina’). She was frail but still fierce, clever, elegant, wicked, contradictory. I once caught her looking, over a busy supper table, at the man who saved her, a fellow passenger, a really decent RAF officer, heroic that day. The look she gave him wasn’t one of gratitude; I’ve never forgotten it. I’m now trying to finish the novel Nina was writing before she died. She’d talk to me about it sometimes: ‘It’s a comedy about a man called Freddie, in his dotage, with irritable bowel syndrome…’ Well, this essay has long escaped its moorings, I think. No irritable bowel syndrome (as yet) but that’s something else that awaits – going forward.
15 May 2017