by Alan Coren
The book was the fitness manual of the Royal Canadian Air Force. I had never seen it before. I do not know anyone in the RCAF, I hardly even know anyone who is fit, and I could come to no other conclusion than that Giles, at about 10, had decided either to escape piano lessons by running away to Toronto and becoming a fighter pilot, or to get himself fit enough to knock his piano teacher about. And then I opened the book. It was a revelation. It was the fitness book I had been looking for all my life. It said you did not have to go to gyms, jog for miles, buy exercise bikes or rowing machines or weights, you could get fit by answering the telephone or putting your hat on.
Thanks to isometrics. Isometrics was a muscle-stress technique whereby every physical action you took was done with total effort: you lifted a phone as if it weighed a ton, you put your hat on as if Arnold Schwarzenegger were trying to lift it off, with the result that you not only drove blood oxygenated to Bollinger effervescence throughout your body, you also transformed that body into a rippling powerhouse able to see off Canada’s enemies without even getting into your plane.
Drawbacks? Social only. I was on the phone when my wife got home, and she was haggard with concern by the time I rang off (what’s happened, your knuckles were white, your veins were standing out, you’re covered in sweat) and when friends came for bridge on Sunday and I went out between rubbers to get drinks, I could hear their fraught mutters (is he all right, he closed that door as if 2 Para were trying to push it open, he’s gripping his cards like a madman, his face went purple during that last contract), but you ignore such things if you’re turning yourself into a titan. Any day now, I shall buy another piano, just so the neighbours can watch me carry it indoors.
59
The Queen, My Lord, is Quite Herself,
I Fear
The only time I lunched with the Queen, the first words she said to me were, ‘Have you any idea what a trial it is to own a golf course?’
I do not remember what I mumbled, but I do remember reflecting that when it came to pre-emptive strikes, my sovereign left Admiral Yamamoto at the post. I had turned up at her palace with my conversational fleet dressed overall, there was not a potential topic I had not buffed to shimmering nick, there was not a drollery unprimed, but she had dived on me out of the sun, and her first wave had devastated me; my battleships were going down by the stern, my carriers were ablaze, and where my submarines had once lurked there were now but pitiable patches of flotsam-dotted oil.
She then launched, while the prawn hung trembling on my fork, into a hilarious account of the shenanigans at her Windsor links, where a demarcation dispute between groundsmen and gardeners had left the fairways unmown. When she had finished, she asked my advice as to her best course of action. I put the prawn down and mumbled something else, drawn this time from my vast experience of owning golf courses, whereupon she said. ‘Was there an exact date when workmen stopped wearing boots? You never see boots on workmen any more.’
The whole of, let us call it our conversation, followed this bizarre unpattern, the monarch unfalteringly displaying a surreal penchant so relentlessly nimble it left the clodhopper winded. It was like going ten rounds against a class flyweight trained by René Magritte and managed by P.G. Wodehouse. By the end of three hours, I had pledged my life to her. Here was wackiness of an order so incomparable it must have been hers by divine right. She was barking regal.
Her husband? I had first met him some years before, when as Rector of St Andrews I attended the investiture of Magnus Magnusson as Rector of Edinburgh, where Prince Philip was Chancellor. We were all in the robing room, struggling into our floor-length velvet numbers, when the Consort suddenly cried: ‘If we were stark naked under these, nobody would be any the wiser!’ He then laughed for a very long time.
It thus came as no surprise to me when, soon after, their son stopped doing Bluebottle impressions and began confiding in flora, leaving me with a conviction rendered all the more unshakeable by the Princess Royal, who when I invited her to a Punch lunch and apologised for limping on a swollen knee, said: ‘Yes, it’s been a ghastly year for equine VD. Did you know it can cause rheumatoid arthritis in jockeys? Everyone’s taking phenylbutazone.’
What am I trying to tell you here? Merely that I have been growing daily more irritated by demands for the Royal Family to shape up, remember who they are, and behave accordingly, because my view is that is precisely what they are doing. They are a very odd lot, and they stand in a long and remarkably impressive line of highly peculiar figures of whom this country ought never to cease for one instant to be proud.
Hitherto, we have cherished them for this astonishing distinction, Edward II, Richard III, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Charles II, George III and IV, Edward VII and VIII – and I pick only the royal tree’s fruitier plums, the ones we relish most for their egregious lusts and vagaries and misdemeanours, for even the dullest have had their moments, be it George V’s terminal injunction to bugger Bognor, or that exercise of Victoria’s remarkable libido which, indulging itself at Windsor, could rattle windows in Cardiff.
So why are we distressed now at what delighted us before? Whence this nonsense requiring the current lot to be moral exemplars and behavioural models, because if they won’t, then it is all up with them? They have never been anything of the sort; what they have been is a collection of flaky English eccentrics beyond the dreams of Ealing Studios, as thankfully unlike their subjects as it is possible to be. Oh, yes, we may rightly tremble at the thought that we might find ourselves married to one, but candidates have had a thousand years to be warned, and if in doubt, Sellar and Yeatman are a quick and easy read.
60
The Green Hills of Cricklewood
You know how it is early in the morning, after you have done the thing with the toothbrush and the razor and you look out the window and it is not raining any more the way it was raining before it stopped, and there is just this mist coming off the sidewalk, now?
I squinted up at the sun which was making the mist do what mists do, and I thought: this is one of the days when you do not start work right away, this is one of the days when you walk up the street, past the old one who is bringing the milk and the young one who is carrying the mail and the tiny one who is pushing newspapers through those holes they have in the doors for pushing newspapers through, and you walk on up to where your street joins the big wide one called Finchley Road, because that is where the place is that is cleaning your trousers, and it is a good day to collect your trousers, before you start work.
But when I got to the big wide one, I noticed that something was not the way it had been before. I noticed this because I had to wait to cross to where the trousers were, on account of the big red buses and the heavy trucks that were driving between me and the place with the trousers and I knew it was not a good time to do the running with the traffic. You could get a wound, down there. These are things you learn. I remembered the time in Pamplona, when I was younger than I am now and had not learned those things, and a cab ran over my suitcase, and the suitcase was never the same, after that. So I waited, which was how I noticed what it was that wasn’t the way it was before. There was a new café there, where there used to be a greengrocery.
The café was called Papa’s.
When I finally crossed over to the place where the trousers were I said to the cleaning one: ‘I see there is a new café here.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It has been here a week, now. They could not get this stain out. They have done a note. They say it is oil.’
‘They are right,’ I said. ‘It is the oil of the mower. If I ask for the Special Treatment they offer in the window, will it come out?’
The cleaning one shrugged. ‘Who can say?’ he said.
I left the trousers with him anyway, and I crossed the road again, and I looked through the window into Papa’s. It had a red tiled floor and round white marble-topped tables and black iron chairs and an electric fan in the ceiling, and I thought: I know why they have called
it Papa’s, and I went in and sat down.
A waitress came up. She was one of the slim ones, with the big dark eyes they have, if you are lucky.
‘Welcome to Cricklewood,’ I said. It is the kind of thing you say, if you have known a lot of women, over the years. ‘It is good to see a café dedicated to Hemingway.’
‘I’m sorry?’ she said.
I smiled. She was very young.
‘The owner of this café would understand,’ I said, but gently. ‘Ernest Hemingway was a writer. He was one of the best writers there was. People called him Papa. He used to sit in cafés just like this, in the days before Paris was the way it is now. The cafés were called the Dome and Les Deux Magots and stuff like that, and they had red tiled floors, too, and white marble tables and black iron chairs and electric fans, and Papa would sit there writing in this ring-backed notebook he had, while the little saucers piled up in front of him.’
‘Does he still do it?’ she said.
I looked away. I did not want to tell her it was thirty years since he had put the shotgun in his mouth.
‘Ask your boss,’ I said. ‘He knows about all that.’
She did the thing with the cloth that makes tables shine.
‘My boss is my dad,’ she said. ‘That is why we called it Papa’s.’
I picked up the menu, after that. There were a lot of breakfasts on it.
‘I’ll have the one with the eggs and the bacon and the tomatoes,’ I said. ‘The Number Four.’
‘Is that the one with the fried bread as well?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that is the one it is.’
61
Making Old Bones
In my younger days, I used to wonder what my skeleton looked like. I can even pinpoint the spark which detonated this speculation: I was studying Hamlet at the time, or at least hitting Gerald Finch over the head with it, because he sat in front of me for O-level English, and Mr Hoskins, to whom Lady Luck had dealt Finch and me from the bottom of her deck, enquired why I had struck my colleague with a cornerstone of our culture, and rather than bring up a girl’s name, for these were gallant days, I replied that we had been having an argument about the play. Oh really, he said, because he had not been born yesterday, what kind of argument, and I said I wanted to know how Hamlet knew the skull was Yorick’s, all skulls look the same, and Finch said the clown told him, sir, and I said why would Hamlet believe a clown if he told me how much water got poured into the average trouser, but would you believe anything a clown said to you in a cemetery sir, and Mr Hoskins said not necessarily, and that is an interesting point, Coren, well, fairly interesting, I shall try to find out whether skulls look different from one another, Mrs Gibson might know, her brother was in the RAMC.
He never got back to me, and it was Guy Mannering the week after that, but the question of what skulls looked like remained inside mine for some years. Nor only skulls, but the entire osseous sub-frame: it bothered me that I should never see mine, except in X-rays, where it always appeared hilarious: there were all these little grey bones, apparently not joined together, one serious sneeze and your entire infrastructure would fall to the bottom of your legs, leaving you to spread across the floor like a deflating blimp. I don’t know why skeletons should be funny, perhaps it is nature’s way of palliating timor mortis; a few years ago I fell off a horse and the osteopath I went to see had a skeleton dangling from his ceiling, pretty comical in itself, but when he hit it with a stick to indicate which vertebra I had damaged it started dancing, I laughed till it hurt, i.e. immediately, and the poor quack said to my wife, is he always like this or could it be concussion?
He said it because she’s a doctor, which brings me to last week’s issue of the British Medical Journal, a comic she regularly passes on to me in the forlorn hope of bridging the marital gap, but for once it contained an article worth the unequal struggle. Entitled ‘A prospective study of alcohol consumption and bone mineral density’, by Troy Holbrook and Elizabeth Barrett-Connor of the University of California, it concluded that heavy drinkers had stronger skeletons than teetotallers. Even better, while drinking strengthened bones, exercise weakened them; i.e. provided you eschewed jogging in favour of slumping in front of Cheers with a large Scotch, you could advance happily into old age knowing you contained a skeleton on which Eiffel himself could not have improved.
Not surprisingly, this lifted the spirits no end (oh, please, today’s is a scientific treatise, if you want puns come back next Wednesday), especially since I could not remember the last time my lifestyle had received anything but an admonitory caning from the medical establishment: it is normally impossible for me to open a paper without reading that everything I do is lopping years off my life, unless I start fell-walking and eating a daily stone of bran I shall not see Christmas, so you may imagine my joy at learning that tipsy inertia was good for you.
And my wretchedness at subsequently discovering that it was not. For Troy and Elizabeth, canny as any hack, had saved the twist for the tail; arriving at their closing paragrahs and poised for statistical evidence that these strong bones of ours were proof against geriatric breakage, I found all hope summarily dashed. Can you guess why? Of course. ‘Studies of fractures and alcohol consumption are confounded by other risk factors, including increased likelihood of impaired vision and falling.’
Alas, poor Yorrick! A’ may have pour’d a flagon of Rhenish on your head once, he always liked a drop, he had bones like pike-staffs, but a fat lot of good they did him the night he walked right off the Elsinore battlements. Thought he saw a ghost, they say.
62
Osric the Hedgehog
There could well be a knighthood in this. For is not my voice broken, my wind short, my chin double, my wit single and every part of me blasted with antiquity, and will I yet call myself young? Add to this the fact that I was born about three o’clock in the afternoon, with a white head and something of a round belly (both of which, interestingly, I seem to be getting back), and you will, I am sure, be hard put to come up with a candidate better qualified to hurtle down to his local job-centre this very minute and offer himself for the position of drinking companion to the Prince of Wales, specialist subject the works of William Shakespeare 1591–1613.
Is there a vacancy? Is there ever. Because, despite the fact that our beloved heir is girt round with all manner of advisers, mentors, boffins, coaches, gurus, tutors and other consultant sycophants ever on the qui vive at the end of a cellphone should HRH’s brow begin to furrow, he appears to have nowhere to turn when it comes to solving the problem of his offspring’s indifference to the Bard. I learned this from the speech he made on Monday when inaugurating his new Shakespeare School at Stratford: ‘I know,’ he confessed, ‘that if I tried to drag my children here, they would say they didn’t want to come, that it would be boring, that they’d far rather play with their computer games.’
The heart bleeds. A picture materialises, does it not, of our deeply caring monarch-in-waiting, tilter at carbuncles, sworn opponent of all he deems to be meretricious, ephemeral, or just plain tacky, leaning on a lectern at the corner of the Highgrove nursery and attempting to interest Prince William in the fact that he, too, will one day be given the latchkey of this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise, this fortress built by Nature for herself against infection and the hand of war, but is William listening? Is Henry? Are they hell, their eyes are glued to two enormous screens, their fingers are twinkling across two keyboards with all the unsettling dexterity of the contemporary young, they are hermetically absorbed in the pressing business of getting out of the dungeon and across the drawbridge before the Terminators climb out of the moat and eat them, they do not give a damn for their old man’s fervent declamation of England’s top iambs, they like things that go tink-tink-tink and bleep-bleep-bleep.
Very well, then. That is why, this morning, I offer my liege lord my sworn service. I have the answer, and I have it after a mere two hours’ fidd
ling with my Macintosh software, for that is all the time that was required to devise Hamlet: Prince of Nintendo. Now, press this key: see, a rudimentary oblong battlement has materialised, with a little Lego-like bloke standing on it. He is called Bernardo. He squeaks, ‘Who’s there?’ A multiple choice now appears: (a) Postman Pat, (b) Francisco, (c) A Ninja Turtle. Press the key again; if you have got the right answer, Francisco, Horatio and Marcellus appear. They are all scuttling about and squeaking like mad. What have they seen? (a) Tyrannosaurus Rex, (b) Gazza, (c) A ghost. If you select Gazza, Horatio explodes, preventing the game from continuing.
The choices, of course, become progressively trickier, particularly if you have selected correctly from (a) Walked under a bus, (b) Martian fell on him, (c) Got murdered by someone pouring poison in his ear, because you have now qualified to enter Part Two of the game, which concerns what Hamlet is going to do about it. If, for example, you select (b) Put on a cape and run Claudius over in the Batmobile, you will have to start again from the beginning, whereas should you choose correctly, you will arrive at the interesting teaser that neither you nor Hamlet knows what he is going to do about it, at which point the little Lego-like figure in the black outfit will ask you what you would do in his position, thus moving the game into its interactive phase, where you will be able to do anything you want, provided, of course, that everybody ends up exploding, as Shakespeare intended.