Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks

by Alan Coren

  I put the phone down, and dried my eyes, and drove to where the original garage used to be. It is now a B & Q superstore. I trekked its every wall, but there was nothing to show. What an odd world it is that reveres the machine-gun but not the crisp! Surely it is time to offer the honour of a small blue plaque? Preferably one with a twist in it.

  54

  Good God, That’s Never The Time? (2)

  Fifty-two? No age, they said. Fifty-two? These days? No age! They said it all day Wednesday. Rang up, dropped in, brought presents, popped corks, filled the premises with cheery cards (albeit mainly about impotence and coffins), shouted, through clouds of marzipan crumbs, what Gladstone did at 87, what Picasso did at 83, what Rubinstein did at 88.

  Convinced me utterly. Despite what, after 50, has become the annual shock of seeing it written down, I did not feel what 52 sounded as if one should feel like. After tea, I went over to the club and played three sets without dying, and it was one of those good days when the Fate who handles the fortuity portfolio allows the ball to coincide with the racquet more often than not, and you think, Bring me Ivan! Bring me Boris!, and you jog home feeling good, despite the little bird trilling beside you to the effect that even if they were to bring you Fred Perry, you’d be going back on a stretcher.

  And when what was lowered into the subsequent bath appeared to displace no more water than it had done when its digits were in reverse order, and when its glottis proved still competent to handle Ol’ Man River without a quiver at either end of the register, and when its teeth stood up to the Extra Hard without the hint of a wobble, and especially when it sloshed on its new skin bracer, tautening each incipient wrinkle to the sleekness of a snare-drum, could it not be forgiven for murmuring to itself: ‘52? No age!’

  So I skipped downstairs, and I decanted lunch’s dissimilar dregs into a single tumbler with that nonchalance which springs from the conviction that 52 is no age for a liver, either, and I set about tearing wrappers from the rest of my presents with these amazingly youthful fingers I have, and, oh what fun!, someone had given me a video called 1938: A Year To Remember.

  I put it on. It was a compilation of Pathé newsreels. Black and white, of course. No colour newsreels, then. And who is this, stepping out of a piston-engined item at what the commentator, in his jovial cut-glass accent, tells me is an aerodrome? The chap is waving a piece of paper. He has a wing-collar on. He is surrounded by photographers in three-piece suits. They keep removing bulbs from what look like frying-pans. The commentator is very happy. ‘This is the greatest diplomatic triumph of modern times!’ he cries.

  And what’s this? The scene has changed. ‘A new giant of the sky is floating into the mist on its maiden flight!’ This is September 1938. I am already on strained solids. I am older than the Graf Zeppelin.

  Oh, look, here comes sport. Wimbledon finals day. Men leaping about in long trousers. ‘And so we say farewell to Bunny Austin!’ Tonight, it will be Donald Budge leading Helen Wills Moody on to the parquet. What will they murmur, as they waltz decorously at arm’s length? That they would be able to go home on the Queen Elizabeth, if only it had been launched? Oh, look, there it is being launched now. Not the QE2, of course. There wasn’t anyone to name a QE2 after, yet, except that little girl running about.

  That’s her father, now, on a beach, surrounded by small boys. He is singing ‘Ooja! Ooja! Rub A Dub A Dub!’ It makes a change from trekking round council estates. ‘Their majesties go into humble homes!’ shrieks the commentator. ‘This Hoxton house is 12 shillings a week!’

  There is a child outside, in a pram. I crane: could it be? Too late, here is Hutton knocking up 364, here is a flying-boat inaugurating the England-Australia run, here is six-year-old Teddy Kennedy opening the Children’s Zoo, here is Gracie, singing as we go, here is Englishman Dick Seaman winning the German grand prix in what appears to be a Mercedes soap-box car. Dick has a swastika round his neck.

  The End. And, at that exact moment, a Lancaster thrums overhead, rattling the sashes, and I run outside just in time to see it, flanked by a Spitfire and a Hurricane. How nice of Tom King to lay it on, if a little de trop. It’s not as if I’m 90, or anything, like the Queen Mother.

  Just 52. No age, these days. Hardly older than a Lancaster.

  55

  Japanese Sandmen

  I have returned to Cricklewood to find that our local futon centre has closed down. I realize that, in the great roster of homecoming trauma, this ranks somewhere below Odysseus’s dog dropping dead or Scarlett’s discovery that Tara is going to need a bob or two spent on fixtures and fittings, but nevertheless it has come as a considerable shock.

  Not because the closure spells, I suspect, the end of some sort of era, nor even because, in the nine years during which I have driven past it every day, the futon centre has become a much-loved feature of the landscape, but because I never once, in all those thousands of days, stopped and walked into it to find out what a futon was. I shall never walk into it now, and I shall never know.

  Mind you – were I to be utterly honest – I cannot be certain that I should ever have plucked up the courage to do it. The time for asking what a futon was passed some years ago. You have to be quick off the blocks with fad-enquiries, if you do not wish to sound like a high court judge looking up from his jotting quill to enquire of the clerk what a hula-hoop is when it’s at home. Even in the matter of bedding: I asked what a duvet was as soon as I heard the word, and to this day I get cold shudders when I think of the ridicule a week’s delay would have invited. As for futons, one morning they did not exist, and the next morning, it seemed, everyone except me was banging on about them with remarkable authority. Since I tended to sidle away from these conversations in case I was exposed, I never did discover what they were, and soon everyone had stopped discussing them and gone on to cellphones and gravad lax, and it was too late.

  Now, lest you begin to think me so untouchable a nerd that the authority of this entire opus is undermined, I should quickly say that I know roughly what a futon is. I can drag the new OED from its shelf as deftly as the next Waterstone browser, and I can read that a futon is a Japanese bed-quilt. This of course tells me nothing at all. Nor do the two quotations the OUP has dug up to endorse this definition, although they go back an astonishing long way for a fad, to 1876 and 1886 respectively. The first, taken from the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, cites: ‘Those who are tired of tinned meats and live futons’, and the second, attributed to one E.S. Morse, says: ‘The futons, or comforters, are hung over the balcony rail to air.’

  I quote these arcana in their entirety. It is obvious that both Mr Morse and the Hon Sec of the ASJ were devout Nipponophiles attempting to curry face by showing that the round-eyes, too, are dab hands when it comes to banging out impenetrable haikus. I have little doubt that the latter gobbet does not mean what it superficially appears to say at all, and probably refers to the insolence of princes or something, and as for the former, it is a yen to a threepennybit that you could sit 50 structuralists in front of their decoders till Doomsday and they would never even come close.

  No, when I say I do not know what futons are, I do not mean I do not know they are some kind of Japanese bedding (I have, after all, caught glimpses of them in the now-whitewashed window these nine years past); I mean that I do not know what is special about them. I have no idea what futonness comprises. What is the essence of its difference from a posture-sprung Slumberland, a chaise-longue, a hammock? Why, on that bright confident morning a decade ago, did everyone who was anyone, from Campden Hill to Tuscany, suddenly and simultaneously become excited by them?

  I suppose it sprang from our peculiar conviction that Orientals have cracked the secret of relaxation. They do go on about it rather a lot. Five minutes in the lotus position, a couple of mantras, a quick tot of ginseng, a pull or two on the old Zen bow, and then into the futon for a good night’s kip and next morning you’re fresh as a daisy.

  That may be onto the futo
n, of course, or under it, or even between them, if they come in twos; I wouldn’t know, and I very much doubt, now, that I ever shall.

  56

  Card Index

  I have received a Christmas card from a dog.

  When I first drew it from the envelope, I did not think it had been sent by a dog, I thought it had been sent by a human being who had bought a Christmas card with a dog on it. I did not think it was much of a card, mind, because the photograph of the dog was not much of a photograph. The head of the dog was all right, but the far end of the dog was a bit out of focus, and the house beyond the far end of the dog was not only even more out of focus, it was wonky as well. This was not a photograph at all, it was a snapshot.

  None of which is to say that it mightn’t have been a professional Christmas card. It is quite hard to tell, these days, with so many charities on the go; I have already received a fair few cards with ill-drawn blobs on the outside and, on the inside, information about dolphin shelters and acid rain and the like, and this canine item might very well have been one such. The dog looked relatively hale, but you never know, it could have had some psychiatric ailment, and as to the quality of the snapshot, perhaps it was the best that the Miserable Dog Trust or whatever could afford. It would be irresponsible to chuck good money away on Lord Snowdon if the Hon Sec had an Instamatic.

  But when I opened the card, it just said: Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Bruno in type, with ‘. . . and his humans, too!’ added in green ink. No signature, no address. I closed it and looked at the dog again. It was a total stranger. Nor could I identify the fuzzy house. It has a fuzzy car outside it, possibly a Volvo, but it’s only a guess.

  This kind of thing has been getting worse, over the years. When I was young, people sent one another cards with robins on. They were not in aid of Robin Relief, nor was the bird a family pet whose turn it was to do the cards that year. You opened them, and they said ‘Merry Christmas to you and yours from Jim and Millie Nugent, “Erzanmine”, Walnut Crescent, Uxbridge’. You knew where you were with cards like that.

  But then, instead of the robin, the personalised card came bob-bob-bobbing along. This had the senders on the front, generally two adults you recognised, surrounded by several infants and a cat. As a shorthand method of keeping abreast of events in households you never visited, it served, I suppose, its purpose. As Yules passed, you watched hair fall out, waists thicken, spectacles arrive, children lengthen, cats degenerate. Sometimes the family moved to the country, and a horse joined them. Sometimes they emigrated, and the Eiffel Tower or the Great Barrier Reef materialised behind them.

  But, as Yeats used to scribble gloomily on his own cards, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. A Christmas would come along when you noticed a new baby sitting by the car, and you thought, ‘Hallo, they’re a bit old for another kid,’ and then you looked at the picture again, and it wasn’t the same wife as last year. An extreme and deeply unsettling example of all this was the card we had a couple of years back from a man I didn’t know at Oxford 30 years ago. He had married the ex-wife of a man I did know at Oxford, and, when she remarried, she was the one who carried on sending cards. These cards had her and her new husband on, plus a couple of new children standing next to her old ones. Then her second marriage broke up and her ex-husband married again, but hung on, apparently, to the old Christmas card list. We now get an annual card from two people we don’t know standing next to a lot of big unfathomable children who could belong to almost anybody.

  And now we have an unfathomable dog. Why the hell Bruno couldn’t have had his surname or address printed, who can say? Might it be some kind of test? People with dogs, I find, expect you to recognise their pets, so it may well be that Bruno’s humans have got him to sort out the wheat from the chaff. If they do not receive a card from me in return, my name will be mud.

  I can think of only one solution to all this. I shall put a notice in the personal column of The Times to the effect that Mr Alan Coren wishes Bruno to know that he will not be sending any cards this year.

  57

  Brightly Shone The Rain That Night

  Boxing Noon, and Hampstead Heath resembles nothing so much as the gale-scattered covers of all those comic annuals ripped yestermorn from their urgent stockings. So many bright new Mickey Mouse gloves! So many bright new Rupert Bear scarves! So many bright new Garfield earmuffs and Kermit boots and Peanuts pullovers! The world, new-laminated, is crying ‘Hallo, Chums!’ Cavorting gaily in the drizzled gloom, all this iridescent giftery – on adult and child alike – seems to bespeak not so much Christmas as some medieval Haberdasherie Fayre upon which the city’s cordwainers and hosiers and mercers and drapers and hatters have descended to propitiate their diverse tutelary gods and flog their latest lines.

  It is all so cartoon-jolly that I do not immediately notice that something is missing. What makes me finally notice it is the singularly poignant sight of a small boy sledding down the sodden East Heath slope, towards the Vale of Health. He has new yellow moonboots on, and a new Snoopy flying helmet. He has a new sled. He could be on the cover of the Beano Annual, were it not for the one thing he does not have. He does not have snow.

  Poor little begger. He is making a valiant fist of it, shoving himself off from just beneath me, lurching down the wet grass, slaloming the bushes with expert toe and mitten, bumping to a halt after a dozen yards, then struggling up again, his mudcaked sled trailing erratically behind him on its sodden string. Had he snow, he would not stop at all, he would hurtle on, shrieking joyously, scattering the pirouetting skaters on Hampstead Pond and finally fetch up, breathless, in Gospel Oak. Because, if he had snow, there would be skaters on Hampstead Pond today, rather than the goose-bumped madmen flaunting their traditional braggadocio in the unfrozen ooze.

  Maybe, in his head, he has it. The imagination, at seven, is rich. Maybe he goes down the hill with six huskies in front and a pack of wolves behind. Maybe the unflagging effort is all about getting to Gospel Oak before Amundsen. My point (I have just decided) is that he shouldn’t have to. He is forced to imagine only because he is forced to compensate for unnecessary disappointment. He should not have been led to expect snow. He should not have torn open his bedroom curtains, immediately after tearing open his sled-wrappings, to have his heart sunk by only drizzle specking the panes.

  For two months now, cotton-wool has been his promissory note. He has stared through it at frosted toys, while Muzak jingled sleigh-bells at him. Tempted inside, he has sat on Santa’s snow-booted knee, and heard how reindeer struggle through blizzards on behalf of good little boys. All his weekly reading has featured snow-capped mastheads, all the stuff within has occupied itself with snowball fights, thin ice, risible snowmen, and mad dogs happily frozen suddenly solid in the act of going for a newsboy’s shin. Everything he has watched on television has ostensibly taken place in arctic conditions, and all anyone has talked about has been the prospect of the white Christmas of which he has been encouraged to dream.

  No chance. We have not had a white yule in 20 years, and the odds on our warming globe ever offering one must be incalculably long. This isn’t Lapland. Christmas snow is but one more EC standard to which we have let ourselves be hijacked. Is it not time to chuck this damaging delusion in?

  What it does here at Christmas is rain. We should make this a meteorological virtue. Let us have a British Santa in cheery yellow oilskins and sou’wester, ho-ho-ho-ing through the drizzle in a dory tugged by six big cod. Let fake raindrops twinkle down our shop windows from autumn on, let our cards show robins on floating logs and coaches in flying spray, and each display, advertisement and grotto anticipate the joys of snug dry firesides bonding happily families together against the cats and dogs beyond.

  Sing I’m Dreaming of a Wet Christmas, Cliff, and let’s be done with it.

  58

  Tuning Up

  They came to take the piano on Friday. They brought it down the stairs from the landing where it had stood for
25 years, and it went bong as it hit every step, but not a bong any musician could have put his finger on, because it had been out of tune for 20 of those years, and if you put your finger on it, the notes that came out belonged to it alone.

  After they had got it down the stairs, they heaved it on to a little cart to wheel it up the garden path to their van, and I walked behind, though lacking an old cock linnet, to see it off. It was a bit like a cortège. One or two neighbours watched – neighbours always watch a removal van – but they didn’t say anything, because there is something about a piano leaving a house that begs discretion. Has the owner gone broke, has he gone deaf, are we watching divorce proceeds being distributed to the musical one?

  It was none of these, it was simply that the piano was clapped-out. It had in truth never been very clapped-in; we had bought it for fifty quid in 1972 for the children to learn, but they learnt very little, except that you don’t get much of a piano for fifty quid. It then stayed in the upstairs hall so that I could use it to tune my banjo, though as the piano was out of tune, the banjo was warped, and my ear is tin, I was never able to play anything that anybody could recognise, except parts of the slow movement of Polly Wolly Doodle. Musicologists among you may be surprised to learn that Polly Wolly Doodle has a slow movement, but that is only because you have not seen my fingering technique. I have to stop after each chord to have a cigarette and work out where to put my fingers for the next one. So, a few days back, I asked a man round to tune the piano, and he said it wasn’t worth tuning, let it go.

  I came indoors again after they had driven away with my quarter of a century, feeling a bit glum because it seemed as though the piano had been delivered only about five minutes earlier, and I went up to look at the spot where the piano had stood, and there was this amazingly thick oblong of untrodden carpet with a lot of stuff on it which had, over the years, fallen off and behind the piano, snapshots, bits of Lego, marbles, Christmas cards, wizened toffees, an Action Man’s head, three light-bulbs, an arrow, what might once have been the newt that climbed out of Victoria’s aquarium in, I think, 1980 – and a book.