by Alan Coren
‘I apologise,’ I replied quickly, ‘it was honest curiosity, merely, I do assure— you watch Mastermind, then? How very inter—’
‘Only,’ muttered the dog, ‘in black and white. Also, the vertical hold’s up the spout. Picture’s like a slot in a letter-box. Peter Woods looks like Chu Chin bloody Chow. Know how many times I been up the Council about that?’
‘Well, I—’
‘There’s dogs in this town with three colour sets at their disposal,’ snapped the tenant. ‘We are two nations, as Disraeli so succinctly put it; for a Jew, anyway.’
‘Nevertheless,’ I said, taking my courage firmly in both hands, ‘for an obviously deeply concerned social democrat—’
‘Absolutely,’ nodded the dog, ‘definitely.’
‘—you seem oddly unconcerned, if I might say so, about the fact that you have been living for three years in a three-bedroomed Council house, modernised for six-and-a-half thousand pounds, when the Council waiting-list contains the names of four thousand families, most of them with small children. Does that not, perhaps, leave you feeling somewhat uneasy?’
The tenant’s teeth bared again, whether in a smile or a snarl it was impossible to say.
‘In this world, sunshine,’ he said, ‘it’s dog eat dog.’
The Cricklewood Years
1990–1999
A.A. GILL
Introduction
This isn’t going to be funny. The first rule of comedy is: ‘Know when not to be funny.’ Actually that’s the second rule of comedy. The first rule is: ‘Be funny.’ No . . . as you were, that’s the first footnote of comedy. The first rule is: ‘Learn how to be funny.’
Whoever said that the first rule of comedy is timing was either an actor or a subeditor, a brace of callings that are Bell’s palsy to humour. This isn’t going to be funny because I know the rules; I know when not to compete. You don’t want to follow Shakespeare in a sonnet karaoke, or Mötley Crüe into an orgy, and you really don’t want to drop a stream of fey drollery into the collected works of Alan Coren. I know my limits, and I know my place. I’m here to introduce the next act, say something nice and get off.
The fourth, or perhaps the fifth, rule of comedy is: ‘Always be funny for a reason.’ There is nothing so happy-sapping as the unattached purposeless joke, and that was what always made Alan Coren’s newspaper columns so readable, so insinuatingly, quietly memorable; they were never just comedy calories, there was always a context. Often – no, usually – the seed, the grit of the homily, was so small, so faint, that you barely noticed it. It would sit in your frontal lobe’s in-tray for the rest of the day and grow a green shoot of an idea, or a pearl of wisdom, depending on whether you got the seed or the grit.
There is in this section a column that I reckon is an almost perfect example of the humorist’s craft. Not least because it manages to get ‘concatenation’ into the first sentence without a ‘by your leave’ or ‘excuse me’. It’s about crisps and Gatling guns. How it gets from crisps to Gatling guns, by way of an Italian driving school, is a small master class in the long and classy tradition of the English humorous essay. It moves with an effortless nonchalance, a saunter, without apparent destination or point. And only when you get to the end can you look back and see that it is as finely constructed, as pristinely pleasing, as a wren’s nest in an Elizabethan knot garden.
The first tradition of the tradition is that we all pretend there is absolutely nothing to humorous writing, that it’s a negligible parlour trick, a piece of amateur patter, an effervescent sleight of mind. Well, let me just this once tell you that no tradition had ever been harder-honed, or more diligently practised, polished and delivered with a lethal accuracy, than Coren’s. The sticky-palmed pianist cracking his knuckles as he faces the sheer precipice of Rachmaninov’s Third needs no less technical skill and dexterity than the comic columnist staring at the glacier of the blank A4 on a Monday morning.
Coren was a craftsman, not an artist. Artists are excitable men with extempore facial hair who beat their mistresses, leave their children destitute and their agents millionaires. An artist makes a unique thing every so often, a craftsman produces things of the same quality over and over by 4.30 on press day. Alan wrote to a standard that rarely varied by the girth of a semi-colon. I could at this point tell you about the perfect pitch of his ear for a rhythm and the mouth-feel of words, his prestigious ability to hug-a-mug colloquialisms with baroque elucidation, the elegance with which he would cast a sentence to make it curl and curve in the air before dropping the feathered hook precisely where he wanted it. I could tell you about the eye for the absurd and the nose for irony – one of the most difficult things to pass off in print. I could dissect all that, but let’s just continue with the traditional pretence that it’s all an amateur hobby.
The 1990s were a foolish, cruel and boastful decade that was made for Alan Coren’s particular view. Remember the idiotic fuss about the Millennium? The sugared dome of New Labour? It was all fields of corn for Coren. We might call these The Cricklewood Years, the low view through the letterbox from the suburbs. Of course it was a front, a conceit. Of course really it was Chaucer, Swift, Cobbett, Pepys, Jerome, McDonnell and Wodehouse, posing as Mr Pooter and Mr Polly. Alan’s column in The Times was generally to be found in the Thunderer’s comments and editorial page, and it would invariably have the startled look of a chap who’s turned up in his tennis flannels at a white-tie dinner. Surrounded by the stentorian stuffed shirts, he would make his sideways discursive point with that characteristic tone of a man who finds a naked duchess in his garden, but notices that she’s standing on the begonias. And then he’d cut along home for cheese on toast, because craftsmen are generally happily married and pass their trade on to their children.
It is a wry and blissful irony that you’re holding Alan’s humbly passed-off thoughts here; it is they that have been collected for posterity, while the louder spittle-flecked diatribes of strident opinion have long since been recycled as crisp packets and that chaff they annoyingly stuff into padded envelopes.
It’s all here in this concatenation, that rare and very English parochially homespun ability to see the world in a grain of sand, and a universe in Cricklewood.
51
Here We Go Round the Prickly Pear
I have nothing against poetry. If it were not for poetry, Postman Pat would have a black-and-white dog.
Poets, however, are another matter. While I derive much joy from what they do for a living, primarily because of the manner in which they do it, when they deploy this manner where it has no business, I derive no joy at all. I go up the wall. I kick things about. For, though I relish the ellipsis and elusiveness of poetry, though I am more than happy to tangle with the ambiguity, the obliqueness, even the downright inaccessibility which poets needs must bring to their tricky trade, I abhor their apparent inability to talk straight when straight talking is required. Never ask a poet what a spade is; you will be there all night.
Oo-er, I hear you murmur, something has clearly upset him today, he is normally the most equable of men. His wick must have something major on it. We are entitled to an explanation.
Let us go then, you and I, to the works of T.S. Eliot. Not to the wondrous conundrums of his verse, but to a letter he wrote, on 26 April 1911, to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley in Boston. He was 22, and on his first trip to Europe; he had gone to stay in Paris, but decided to nip over to London for a few days, and it is this visit about which he is writing. Here is the nub, both of his letter and of my complaint:
‘I was out of doors most of the time. I made a pilgrimage to Cricklewood. “Where is Cricklewood?” said an austere Englishman at the hotel. I produced a map and pointed to the silent evidence that Cricklewood exists. He pondered. “But why go to Cricklewood?” he flashed out at length. Here I was triumphant. “There is no reason!” I said. He had no more to say. But he was relieved (I am sure) when he found out that I was American. He felt no longer responsible. But Crickle
wood is mine. I discovered it. No one will go there again. It is like the sunken town in the fairy story, that rose just every May-day eve, and only one man saw it.’
Is it any wonder that as I stumbled upon that paragraph in my nice new Letters of T.S. Eliot yesterday I trembled with anticipation? Nor any less wonder that as I came to the end of that paragraph and found it was all that Eliot had to say about Cricklewood, I trembled, now, with rage? For God’s sake, Tom, what did you mean? Why ‘pilgrimage’ – what did you know beforehand? More to the point, what did you know afterwards? Why is Cricklewood yours, what did you discover, why is it like the sunken town in the fairy story?
A terrible urge came on me to chuck the book in the bin; here was the century’s greatest poet, certainly the greatest ever to fall for Cricklewood, offering me nothing of which I could make head or tail. Why could he not come right out and say what made my backyard so magical, so worth not merely a detour, but a pilgrimage? Why couldn’t he have bunged Eleanor a simple postcard, Here I am in fabulous Cricklewood, bloody ace, Guinness is tuppence a gallon, you never saw such big whelks, no bedbugs to speak of and I have to beat the women off with a stick, hoping this finds you as it leaves me, in the pink, T.S. Eliot?
I did not, however, bin the book, I went instead to fetch another, for something had occurred to me; only two months after visiting Cricklewood, Eliot finished his first major work, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Since he had fiddled and fussed with it for years, what might have spurred him, suddenly, past the post? I opened Collected Poems.
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent . . .
I closed the book again. I had hitherto believed that the squalid, unnamed town in which J. Alfred murmured his glum monologue was part Baudelaire’s Paris, part Dante’s Hell. Now, I looked at his letter again. It was as I feared: how had I beguiled myself into believing he had said what I thought he had meant? Why had I imagined it contained one single word to suggest Eliot had actually liked Cricklewood?
Between the idea and the reality, falls the Shadow.
52
Uneasy Lies the Head
If for nothing else, today’s feuilleton will be remarkable for recording the smallest thing ever to go wrong with a house in its owners’ absence. Indeed, so confident am I of this claim that if any reader writes to me with a smaller, he will receive, by return of post, a magnum of the finest Toblerone.
I spent the Bank Holiday weekend in Edinburgh, where it I turned out not to be a Bank Holiday at all; so that I came home feeling oddly deprived. It was not for some time that I discovered the yet odder depths to which deprivation may plummet.
It was four hours, to be precise; which is precisely what I can be. I know that my key turned in the lock at 3 p.m., because I heard the cuckoo clock in the kitchen observe this; just as I know that it was 7 p.m. when I discovered what I discovered, because I was in the kitchen itself at the time, slicing the lemon for the yard-arm gin, and when the clock cuckooed, I looked up.
Owners of clocks of the order cuculidae will not need an explanation for this, but the rest of you might be thunderstruck to learn that that is what you do if you are in a room with one at any time after five o’clock. Up until five o’clock, the number of cries registers in the head, but after that time you have no idea how many it is, and you have to look up at the clock to see what hour it is.
I looked up just in time to see the little door shutting. And, in the nanosecond before it did, to note that what it was shutting on was not the cuckoo.
I walked across to the clock, prised open the door with my forefinger, and peered into the cuckoo’s premises. It was not there. It had flown its tiny coop. To make doubly sure, I forefingered the minute-hand around to eight o’clock: the door burst open, the voice cried eight times, but what leapt out on each of these eight occasions was nought but a wobbling spring. The cuckoo was not on the end of it.
Where had it gone? And why? Had it, perhaps, in ecstasy at finding it had the house to itself, hurtled so joyously from its cavity that it had detached itself from its tiny umbilicus? Or heard, maybe, the rumour of a sparrow-clock somewhere, and gone off to lay an egg in it?
Unlikely. It is, in truth, only half a cuckoo. It is little more than a head on a spring. I cannot speak for more expensive clocks, it may well be that the Swiss houses of parliament sport a giant example which hourly lurches from its penthouse atop Big Bird intact in every particular, but mine, sadly, does not have the wherewithal to parturiate. It does not even have legs. It could not have gone far. I searched the kitchen floor. Nothing.
Had a clockwork cat got in?
I wondered if the head might have fallen off not forwards at all, but backwards. It could be lying on the floor of the works, struggling ventriloquially every time the spring sprang out. It dawned upon me that Wordsworth must have suffered similar horological shock; nothing else could explain so awful a line as ‘O Cuckoo! Shall I call thee bird, or but a wandering voice?’ It is exactly what the old fool would have cried upon walking into Dove Cottage to find himself confronted with a headless chime.
I took the clock from the wall, and removed the back, appropriately enough, with my Swiss Army knife. Exactly, I’m sure, what the Swiss Army would have done in the circumstances. The head was not inside.
Three days have now passed, and some 50 phone calls. Can you believe that there is not a spare cuckoo head to be found anywhere in these islands? I tried this morning to fashion one from Plasticine, with a little matchstick beak, but it was too heavy, it lumbered out on the first cry, hung dangling over the clockface, and refused to go back until manhandled.
I do not know what to do. I may have to junk the clock. The kitchen is below my bedroom, I hear the cry in the small hours, and I would swear a derisory note has crept into it. They do change their tune, you know.
53
Salt in the Wound
I experienced a remarkable concatenation yesterday. I had gone to the Italian Driving School in Clerkenwell Road to make an enquiry on a friend’s behalf (sensitively refraining from making any on my own, despite burning to know about the teaching of Italian driving, eg how to steer with your chin so that you can simultaneously keep the hooter depressed and leave both hands free, one to shake its fist, the other to raise its central finger), and when I came out again, I found myself a bit peckish, so I bought a packet of Smith’s potato crisps.
I strolled on, thinking of nothing in particular, when I chanced to notice a blue plaque, high up on a redbrick wall at the corner of Hatton Garden, attesting to the curious fact that Sir Hiram Maxim (1840–1916), inventor of the machine-gun, had lived there.
That is the kind of information which suddenly makes one think of something in particular. While I already knew a bit about the great man – including the tragedy wherein a malicious Fate cruelly snatched him away in June, robbing him by only a few short days of the chance to see his greatest masterpiece, the First Battle of the Somme – I had no idea that this was where he had hung his hat. How tolerant landladies must have been, then! Not to mention the people in the flat downstairs; but, then again, you might think twice, might you not, before banging on the ceiling and thereby getting on the wrong side of a man who had just been practising at 500 rounds a minute?
These and similar woolgatherings having brought me to the end of the packet of crisps, I looked for a wastebin; and that I could not immediately spot one was what brought on the remarkable concatenation. I put the empty bag back in my pocket, where it remained until I got into the bus on Farringdon Road and dug for change. The bag was now in my hand again, where, by sheer chance, a word leapt off it and into my eye, the way this word, as I may have mentioned before, will. On the top right-hand corner of the packet, this legend ran: ‘Fr
ank Smith sold Britain’s first crisps to the pubs of Cricklewood. The salt-cellars he provided vanished as fast as the crisps. The little blue twist of salt was his ingenious solution.’
Well I never. I mean, literally. Twenty years in Cricklewood, and I had never caught whiff nor whisper of our greatest son: for how else was one to describe a man who had invented not only the crisp, but also the little bag of salt to be a helpmeet for it? This was major genius. It was as if the Earl of Sandwich had come up with the pickled onion. Research was urgently called for. And when, an hour later, I rang Smith’s (or as it now is, eheu fugaces, PepsiCo Foods International), one who still remembers the old days remembered them for me.
In 1920, Frank Smith was a young Cricklewood grocer, left to mind the shop while his employer holidayed in France. When the employer returned, he brought with him a wondrous tale of a little French restaurant where he had been served with thinly-sliced fried potatoes. He then got back to doing what employers do, leaving Frank to do what geniuses do. Geniuses have a bit of a think. After which, they remove their apron, politely hand in their notice, pop round to a bank manager whom they have circumspectly ensured never went short of a nice bit of gammon even in the darkest days of the recent hostilities, and buy the lease on a rundown Cricklewood garage which the instinct of genius tells them is just the place to begin manufacturing potato crisps.
How could it fail? It did not. The only commercial setback was that as Cricklewood’s boozers fell upon Smith’s delectable invention, they ungratefully nicked the saltpots he had loaned them. Smith, however, was up to that. Smith took fresh guard. The answer was in the bag.