Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks

by Alan Coren

  LITTLE GULL

  The little gull is to be found mainly in supermarkets, where it is a sucker for special offers on unlabelled tinned goods. Unlike the Big Gull, which will believe anything it hears about Concorde, North Sea oil, reflation, détente, and so forth, the little gull is conned only by small operations: it will, for example, listen to encyclopaedia salesmen for hours, and often comes home with little things it has picked out of open suitcases in Oxford Street. It is despised by other birds, who are always off-loading unwanted junk on it and, in spiteful mood, telling it tall stories. The little gull, in consequence, believes that the world is flat, and lays its eggs under gooseberry bushes.

  MEDITERRANEAN GULL

  The Mediterranean gull is bigger than the little gull (q.v.) but no brighter. As its name suggests, it flies to the Mediterranean for the winter, but frequently fails to arrive, since it asks directions from any bird it passes. Mediterranean gulls can, as a result, be found anywhere, at any time of the year; in 1974, three hundred of them spent Christmas in Preston, and a permanent colony now inhabits Tierra del Fuego in the belief that it is Majorca.

  Occasionally, however, they do arrive in the Mediterranean, only to discover that they have once more been fooled and that their winter colony is only half-built, miles from the sea, and that they have to sleep twelve to a nest. When they examine the small print in their insurance, they invariably find that they are indemnified only against cycling accidents.

  GYR FALCON

  According to p. 788 of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary (which I borrowed from a little gull who owned forty-seven copies), the gyr falcon, or gerfalcon, is a native of Iceland, and the gyr describes (from the Latin gyrus) its habit of flying in circles. From this solid information, we can only induce that it has come here to negotiate, although watch your newspapers for reports that its negotiating circles have widened to two hundred miles in diameter and that it has taken to ramming any English birds found within that limit.

  PURPLE HERON

  The purple heron is the latest miracle offering from Heron Birds Ltd. Feathered in tasty purple skivertex, with an elegant machine-tooled simulated goldette spine, it spends its life flying into people’s homes on ten days’ approval, telling them about the sexual passages in Tolstoy. If attacked, its method of defence is to fall apart. Attractive on its own, the purple heron in fact looks best when standing on a shelf with ten others like it.

  SCARLET ROSEFINCH

  The most intriguing features of this bird are that it is neither scarlet nor a rosefinch. It is more like a large green starling than anything, but not much. Its nomenclature, however, is quite without precedent, and won’t happen again, either, if I’m any judge of these matters. Its name was given to it by an ornithologist in debt to a tailor called Sam Rosefinch to the tune of £86. Sam Rosefinch’s wife, on the other hand, had always been driven by dreams of show business, and in 1940, following the overwhelming success of Gone With The Wind, cut her hair like Vivien Leigh’s, changed her name from Lily to Scarlet, and took up drawl lessons. Since there were now three million women in a similar position, Scarlet Rosefinch’s career came to nothing, and she went back, in deep depression, to cutting out waistcoat linings. Hearing of this, and instantly seeing it as a way out of his financial difficulties, the ornithologist called on Sam Rosefinch and offered to name his latest discovery after Sam’s wife, in return for the £86, plus a spare pair of trousers for his blue worsted. Everyone ended up happy, except for the thing like a green starling, which spends its life answering embarrassing questions from other rosefinches.

  SHORE-LARK

  During the week, the shore-lark works in the City and flies home every night to its mate in Wimbledon, where it is a model husband and father. At weekends, however, it migrates briefly to Brighton, on any one of a hundred pretexts, where it meets female shore-larks under the pier and seeks to recapture its lost youth.

  GREEN SANDPIPER

  The green sandpiper differs from other sandpipers in that it never learns from its experiences. Many are so green, in fact, that they do not even have experiences. In consequence, the male green sandpiper frequently fails to consummate its spring-time relationships, while the female green sandpiper is just as frequently taken down to Brighton by shore-larks. This means that while both the green sandpiper and the shore-lark are understandably rare, and protected, the Greenish Shorepiper is just about the most common bird there is, and shot at all the time.

  CETTI’S WARBLER

  Often vulgarly known as the dead warbler, from its habit of sleeping twenty-four hours a day, this bird’s correct name was coined in 46 AD, when the Cetti, of Eastern Marathon, were besieged by the Zuccini under their leader Caius Gnocchi the Indecisive. The Cetti, unable to maintain the round-the-clock vigilance necessary to prevent the breaching of their walls, decided to use geese, as was then the custom, for watchdogs. This decision having been taken, the Cetti leaders were then horrified to discover that their geese had been eaten by the starving townspeople the day before. The only birds left in the city were the warblers, who were too small and fiddly to eat. These were gathered up, and stationed at strategic positions on the ramparts, after which the soldiers retired to their desperately-needed rest. That night, the Zuccini mounted their attack, entered the city, and slew the Cetti to a man. The warblers slept through it all.

  20

  Go Easy, Mr Beethoven,

  That Was Your Fifth!

  ‘Shrunk to half its proper size, leathery in consistency and greenish-blue in colour, with bean-sized nodules on its surface.’ Yes, readers, I am of course describing Ludwig van Beethoven’s liver, and I do apologise for going over such familiar ground, but I wanted to put the less musical members of my flock in the picture right from the start. I think they also ought to know that his spleen was more than double its proper size: far too many soi-disant music-lovers these days, when they drop the pick-up on Egmont or the Eroica and retire to their chaise longue for a quick listen, think to themselves Poor old sod, he was deaf as a brick, and leave it at that, entirely neglecting the fact that beneath the deaf-aid on his waistcoat Herr van Beethoven sported as misshapen a collection of offal as you could shake a stick at, including a pancreas the size of a pickled walnut and a length of intestine that could have been mistaken for pipe-lagging by all but the most astute German plumber.

  I am reminded of all this internal strife by today’s Guardian, which, in its copy-hungry turn, quotes from the current issue of the Journal of Alcoholism, a periodical of which I had not previously heard. Which is odd, since if I’m not on their mailing list, who is? At all events, this bizarre broadsheet has clearly decided that it is not going to be outdone in Ludwig’s bicentenary year by all the other mags, and has hopped aboard the wagon, if they’ll pardon the expression, with a succinct length of verbiage by one Doctor Madden, consultant psychiatrist at a Chester hospital addiction unit. He it is whom I quote at the beginning of this feuilleton, and if I may say so, Doctor, as one stylist to another, I have rarely encountered so well-turned a memorial to a great man. Why that sentence was not chiselled on Ludwig van Beethoven’s gravestone, I shall never know. I gather you’ve translated it from the report of his autopsy, and it may be that it reads even better in German, but I doubt it: poetry is what ‘bean-sized nodule’ is, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Indeed, you may well have altered the listening habits of an entire generation: how shall any of us be able to tune in to Fidelio again, without the tears springing to our eyes at the memory of the greenish-blue liver behind it? Will our rapture at the Emperor not be intensified beyond measure by the thought of that gigantic spleen, throbbing away like a ship’s boiler under the composer’s vest?

  One flaw, however, mars the sunny scholarship of your piece: not content to commemorate the bicentenary merely by your thrilling evocation of distorted bowel and giblet and leaving it at that, you insist, I’m afraid, on going on to moralise. And it’s none of your business, Doc. Having broken the unethical
news that Ludwig’s organs got this way through a daily consumption of booze that could have floated a Steinway down Kaiserstrasse, you then wind up the scoop with the homiletic clincher: ‘Beethoven had a brain and mind capable of many years of musical productivity, had his life not been shortened by alcohol.’ Now, I realise that this oleaginous aside may have been the result of editorial pressure, and that if you hadn’t put it in all your readers might have rushed out immediately and begun hitting the sauce in the hope of coming up with a quartet or two, but couldn’t you have turned the sentiment a little less harshly? And aren’t you being just a teeny bit demanding? Aren’t nine symphonies, thirty-two piano sonatas, seven concertos, two masses, sixteen string quartets, and two suit-casefuls of quintets enough for you and the rest of mankind?

  And don’t you perhaps feel that, after that lot, posterity owes Ludwig a little snort or two?

  I suppose not. All human life is divided between those who order by the crate and those who believe that sherry trifle leads to the everlasting bonfire, and never the twain shall meet except on the sodden salient of the Journal of Alcoholism for such brief and bitter skirmishes as the one filleted above. You’re on one side, Doc, and Ludwig and I are on the other. My own conclusion would be diametrically different from yours, viz, that if Beethoven had not been a regular supplier of empties to the trade, he wouldn’t have written anything at all, and how does that grab you, abstemious musicologists? If the great man had been confined to Lucozade on the advice of Chester’s addiction unit, my bet is that he’d have thrown in the towel at Chopsticks and gone down in history as a mediocre hosier.

  Because it is no accident that all men of creative genius have toiled in the shadow of the corkscrew – how else is a giant to survive among pygmies, make the mundane tolerable, fence himself off from the encroachments of numbing normalcy? How but through regular intakes of fermented anaesthetic are we – there, I’ve said it – artists to stave off the canvas jacket and the screaming abdab? How must Beethoven have felt of a morning, his head full of whirling crotchets and jangling semi-breves, to have his housekeeper running off at the gob about the price of vermicelli, or shrieking through his blessed deafness in an attempt to bring home to him the immutable truth that if you send six pillowcases to the laundry, you only ever get five back? Is it any wonder that he followed up his Special K with a few quick chasers of schnapps? Do you for one moment imagine that the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major was written by a teetotaller, given the fact that the decorators were in the haus at the time, Beethoven’s shoes hadn’t come back from the cobblers, he was four months overdue on his Schedule D payment, his mistress had run off with a door-to-door wurst salesman, and the dog had just trodden on his glasses?

  And, worst of all, people like you, Doctor Madden, were constantly nagging him to get on with the bloody music, what about a couple of quick symphonies to follow up the 9th, shouldn’t take you more than an hour or so to rattle ’em off, mate, and how would you like to address the Rotarians next Wednesday night, dress formal, and isn’t it time you did a personal tour of Silesia, and by the way it’s the Prime Minister’s birthday coming up, so could you see your way clear to knocking out a little celebratory sextet, no fee naturally, oh yes, I nearly forgot, my wife’s brother plays the triangle, not professional of course, but we all think he’s rather good, so I’ve arranged a little dinner-party next Friday to give you the chance of hearing him . . .

  I’m amazed his nodules didn’t get any bigger than beans, all things considered.

  It’s a dodgy tightrope along which we creators wobble, Doc: enough booze to close the world off and keep us inventing, but not so much that we allow the golden haze to settle on us permanently, while the piano-strings slacken, and the typewriter rusts, and the brushes dry out and go stiff, and the public yawns and goes off in search of fresh fodder, muttering about what an inconsiderate bleeder that Shakespeare was, snuffing it in his fifties and leaving us with little more than Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, well I’m not surprised, you know what they say, he couldn’t leave the stuff alone, liver like a dried pea, well that’s the trouble with artists, isn’t it, hoity-toity, too good for the rest of us, they’ve got to be different, haven’t they, bloody bohemians the lot of them, load of boozers, junkies, fairies, layabouts, I mean to say, only nine symphonies, only thirty plays, only ten novels, only ONE Sistine Chapel (they say he was so pissed he couldn’t get up the ladder), I mean, what do you expect?

  Et in El Vino ego, Doc. In a small way, of course. What might I not have done, be doing, were it not for the lure of the barmaid’s pinny and the brass-handled pump? Ah, the first chapters I have! What prolegomena! What flyleaf notes! A thousand words of the best, then it’s off to the local for a self-congratulatory belt, and when I roll home, in a day or two, all is ashes, forgotten, dead. How was it going to go on, this trilogy, before those bottles intervened? Who was this character, and this, and who cares, now? Ah, those publishers’ lunches, yes, I’ll do a novel, yes, I have this wonderful idea, he meets her, see, and they go off to Ensenada, and her husband, broken by drugs and a lifetime of inferior diplomacy, kills his mistress, let’s have another bottle of this excellent Mouton Cadet, but their son returns from the Congo where his mercenary activities have involved him with none other than, my goodness this is an amicable cognac, oh yes, you should certainly have the first draft by February, as you say, it’s a natural, film rights alone should bring us in . . .

  And I wake up in a Turkish bath, some time later, and can only remember that I had my umbrella when I left the house, but was it in the cab, or was it in the restaurant, or am I thinking of my raincoat?

  Well, that’s it, Doc, another thousand words, another bottle. And that’s all you’ll get from me today. All I ask is that when my liver and I kick off, and the Journal of Alcoholism rings up for a few succinct remarks on posterity’s loss, you’ll recall all this, and understand a little.

  It may surprise you, but I’d hate to be remembered as just another greenish-blue liver, shrunk to half its proper size.

  21

  Take the Wallpaper in the Left Hand

  and the Hammer in the Right . . .

  You live with a woman for ten years, not an intimacy remains unshared, and where are you?

  It was Christmas morning, possibly with a capital M, so auspicious was the time, and the house re-echoed to the Yuley joy of children breaking their new toys over one another. Since dawn, the air had been filled with flying cogs, the walls of the upstairs hall shone with new day-glo graffiti, and on the stairs the pitiful shards of model soldier lay thick as on the field of Omdurman, their little swords and broken rifles still game for a last kamikaze jab at the bare parental sole as it lurched, hung-over, through the inimical pile towards the reviving caffeine.

  I hobbled eventually to a breakfast table that would have left Oliver Wendell Holmes himself speechless. A doll’s eye glared up from the porridge, rubber insects were all over the toast, and beside the coffee-pot stood the remains of an electric dog. Cobbled together in far Nippon by deft saffron digits, the animal had been a masterpiece of delicate invention a half-hour earlier, when my small daughter first flung herself at its wrappings. In theory, when you pulled its leash, two batteries in its cunningly hollowed bowels sprang into energy, and its little tail wagged while its little legs waddled it forward and its little head nodded as its little mouth yapped.

  In practice, however, you pull its leash, and a little tin flange clicks up and down obscenely in its hindquarters, the tail having fallen off, and its little legs waddle it forward at a slow limp; but its little head does not nod, because its little head is now on the other side of the table. The decapitated torso, in fact, is crawling towards its severed skull, and, illogically, barking at it. As the high point of a Hammer film, the thing now has few equals, but as a cuddly toy it has all the winsome appeal of a clockwork boil.

  I was still staring at the furry wreckage and musing on the whims of economic
history whereby Japan’s fiduciary sun was allowed to rise on such insubstantial collateral as this, when I heard my wife say: ‘Never mind, you’ll be able to mend all their toys now.’

  How shall I describe the nudgy emphasis of that NOW? She is a subtle girl, and when she slips into italics, every hackle I have tells me there are difficult times ahead.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I riposted wittily.

  ‘You haven’t opened your present,’ she said.

  ‘Oh!’ I cried, having practised; and having painstakingly ignored the large parcel beside my chair which contained a half doz shirts, at the very least, possibly a brace of sweaters, and who knew how many ties, cravats, matching foulards? What the sequitur might be bridging them to the dismembered doggie, I could not begin to guess; but it had been a pretty heavy night, and I might well have lost a syllogistic rivet or two along the way.

  I threw my remains upon the parcel and, having broken a forenail on the knot and gashed a thumb on the paper (co-ordination is one of my shorter suits: I am one of the few men I know to bang his head on seven-foot lintels), I came to a book. A book with a lock and a handle on it, yet.