by Stephen Fry
The Professor opened his door to me in some surprise.
‘So you’ve finished that essay on the Great Fricative Shift at last, young man?’
I assured him that I had not, but was still pursuing some more lines of research. I begged another nine-year extension, which he gracefully allowed.
‘These things take time,’ he conceded. ‘My article on Slovakian Diacriticals for the Neue Philologische Abteilung took seventeen years simply to proof-read. I am persuaded it was worth the effort, however. You read the piece of course?’
‘Who has not?’ I replied, an evasion he was graceful enough to ignore.
‘Dear me!’ he cried, rubbing his hands with glee. ‘I shook a few people up with that little paper! They tell me that copies of it were publicly torched at the Cornell Convention on Phonemes last year and that a certain lecturer at the School of Slavonic Studies in London hanged himself on account of my strictures on the origins of Croatian verbs of motion.’
We walked together along the Backs.
‘Where’s it all gone, Donald?’ I asked. ‘This is not the Cambridge I knew. The buildings are the same, you are the same, and yet …’
Trefusis gazed down at the sweetly flowing Cam from which floated up the melancholy strains of a punting tourist in a Gazza® hat singing ‘Just one Cornetto’ to the tune of ‘O Sole Mio’.
‘You cannot step into the same river twice,’ he quoted, ‘for fresh water is always flowing past you.’
‘Heraclitus!’ I exclaimed.
‘Bless you,’ he said. ‘Your Cambridge was built of people, not of bricks and stone and glass, and those people have severally dispersed into the world. They will never be assembled together again. The circus has long since folded its tents and stolen silently away and you are standing on the empty village green wondering why it looks so shabby and forlorn.’
‘You’re right,’ I sighed, ‘as always, you are right.’
‘Of course I am. Now pop off out of my sight. You smell of mortality. I don’t need you to remind me of my age, I have a bladder to do that for me.’
I returned to the film set in time to be bombarded with more questions from the crew.
‘Would a typical undergraduate have hung their Freshers’ Photograph on their wall? Did they wear gowns to lectures? Did they leave their doors open?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ I said. ‘This is my first time here.’
A Bang on the Head
If the following words seem to you to be senseless wanderings from a tragically disordered mind I must apologise. I have just sustained an extremely violent bang to the head and it is possible that I am in a concussed and confused state.
It is not uncommon for people of my height to bump their skulls against lintels, beams and other projecting members. The usual procedure for me after such an occurrence, once all the effing and blinding has died away, is gingerly to prod the affected area of the cranium and run through a kind of check-list to determine how much my mind has been affected by the shock to its housing.
I ask myself firstly how much two plus two might come to. If I don’t arrive at the answer ‘yellow’ or ‘Cardinal Richelieu’ I move on to my name, fax number and age. If I satisfy myself on these points I turn over the examination paper, as it were, and question myself closely on the date of Magna Carta, the capital of Uruguay and the name of the currency of Bulgaria. Then I turn to more difficult questions like whether there is a God, the reason men have nipples and the purpose of Geoffrey Wheatcroft. These problems are insoluble in a normal state of mind, but it is always possible that a bang to the head will bring about improvements that offer up previously denied insights.
It is of course an absurd and illogical reaction. If my mind were to be lost through a sharp blow how would I know what questions to ask? And how would I know if the answers I gave were wrong or right?
The surest test of softening or deterioration in the brain after an accident, it seems to me, is a desire on the part of the subject to sue someone or something. I banged my head in a very respectable Cambridge hotel. The blow was so severe that I found myself instantly sitting down. It is possible that I even lost consciousness for a small number of seconds.
As I sat there, nursing the medulla oblongata and embarking on my check-list, I found myself suddenly surrounded by a surging savannah of grey-striped trousers and concerned expressions. The hotel staff had observed the incident and were embarking upon the complex business of apology. The hotel, like almost every hotel in Britain nowadays, is part of a chain and I dare say there are very definite procedures to be undertaken when a guest has an accident within company premises. Procedures more to do with making sure that responsibility is never owned up to than with genuine expressions of sympathy, regret or fellow-feeling. This is in line with what travelling salesmen who frequently use cars are taught. After an accident, whatever the reason for it, never ever say ‘sorry’ to the other party involved. To say ‘sorry’ admits liability. I find this repellent and nauseating in the extreme. Most English people will apologise to a hatstand if they walk into it, let alone another human being. One would much rather hear a hotel manager say ‘So sorry’ and see him go up to the offending beam into which a guest had bumped and smack it crossly crying ‘naughty, naughty beam’ than hear him greasily ask ‘Didn’t you see the large well-lit sign saying “Mind Your Head” hung clearly on the beam, sir?’
Of course the sign was there, of course the whole incident was, as it were, my fault. In life, if you are six foot four and a half inches tall, clumsy and occasionally distrait, you will bump into things. All one asks for, when it happens, is a teensy weensy bit of sympathy and just a smidgin of a scintilla of an iota of a soupçon of a shade of a suspicion of a shadow of concern. When it is not forthcoming, one’s temper rises with the bump on the loaf and thoughts, strange, un-English thoughts, of civil actions and law suits actually do flit across one’s mind. The very care and unctuous deftness with which liability is denied makes one determined to prove it.
With luck, reflection and a finger or two of good Islay malt will restore reason to its throne. There is a sort of absurd reverse Catch 22 that argues that anyone who could seriously sue a hotel or organisation after a simple accident must be so mentally damaged that they have cause.
‘M’lud, does not the very fact that my client is doing something so preposterous as suing demonstrate how clearly deranged he has become?’
Case proven, ipso facto.
Fortunately however my mind is not one whit affected and I retain all my faculties.
I must leave you now, order a nice Pot Noodle from room service and enjoy that marvellous programme Telly Addicts. Good night, citizens. Next year your Emperor will be in Moscow. Help yourself to Wine Gums.
Dear Sid
This week filming has begun for a second series of Jeeves and Wooster. I’m sorry to spring this appalling intelligence so suddenly upon you but, as with removing old sticking plasters, these things are best got over with quickly. If you managed to miss the screenings last time and have somehow contrived not to buy the videos available at most good stores, you will have no idea what I am talking about, so I shall explain. Jeeves and Wooster is a television series about the exploits of the character Jeeves and the character Wooster. We took up five hours of valuable prime ITV viewing time earlier this year with our first series and intend to infest your screens again with six new-minted episodes in the spring of 1991. Book your skiing holidays now.
We have started in the grand old resort of Sidmouth, Devon. Do you know Sidmouth? The silver ribbon of time that is the River Sid twists amiably down through Sid Vale, Sidbury and Sidford until it opens into the south coast at Sidmouth. As you can see there are more Sids to be found in South Devon than at a 1950s dog-track. Here too can be seen large Edwardian hotels called the Belmont, the Westcliff, the Victoria and the Riviera; a long esplanade with a greater concentration of tea-rooms, bun-shops and knick-knackariums than one would have imagined possible outsi
de the novels of E.F. Benson. Cliffs, too, abound. Nobody does cliffs quite like the English, do they? I have never seen anything worthy of the name in Australia or California. The Greeks and Italians seem innocently to believe that they can bung a hill or a rocky promontory somewhere near a coastline and pass it off as a genuine escarpment, but they never even gesture at the great sheer splendours of the classic British cliff as available in Caswell Bay, Cromer, Dover or our own dear Sidmouth.
Sidmouth, like every English resort worthy of the name, is pleased to tell the visitor that it rejoices in a climate which gives it the lowest rainfall and greatest number of sunshine hours in Britain. The air is uniquely balmy, bracing and healthful; the waters peerlessly sweet, clear and invigorating. This is true of towns as far afield as Bournemouth, Skegness, Morecambe and Scarborough and just goes to show how much God smiles on the sea-side.
Sidmouth caters for the more mature citizen. Bridge not bingo; thin lemon-coloured cardigans rather than T-shirts; a putting-green instead of crazy golf; stay-pressed leisure slacks before Levi 501’s. Other, less happier, towns may hurry on a dizzying, madcap, frenzied path to hell with their juke-boxes, frothy coffee and drug-crazed kinemas, Sidmouth has no use for such diabolical distractions. Here the pleasures of promenading before the pre-lunch Amontillado or challenging the Potters to a round robin on the croquet lawn take unruffled precedence. The only coin-operated machine I have so far sighted has been a telescope. The word arcade in Sidmouth means a line of shops and that, surely, is as it should be.
There are an average of four deaths a week in the hotels of Sidmouth, I was told yesterday. It is the usual practice amongst the hoteliers to remove bodies from their hotel rooms at two o’clock in the morning, so as not to unsettle the guests. If you’re going to hop the twig in Sidmouth, hop it late in the day or you’ll have a long cold wait for your coffin.
Yesterday, the town was transported to the early thirties, not as long a journey for Sidmouth as it would have been for most English resorts. There were no television aerials for us to take down, no yellow lines on the kerb for us to conceal, precious little need for the hair of the local people hired as extras to be cut any shorter.
The Silver Band was dressed up in fancy uniforms and sat in a bandstand on the esplanade playing Maid of the Mountains. Children were popped into sailor-suits and long baggy shorts and given shrimping nets to run around with; donkeys, flannel trousers, bathing togs, bath-chairs, canvas wind-breaks and changing-booths abounded. In the distance Rudge Whitworth motor-bicycles and Morris Cowley automobiles chugged along the coast road. It was heaven, sheer heaven under Roy Plomley seagulls and a blue English sky.
Period drama like Jeeves and Wooster is sometimes accused of being hide-bound and retrograde in its sentimental evocations of a past Britain lit in glowing colours and dressed in perfect, crisp linens. We are held back, it has been said, by our obsessions with the moribund past of a never-never land. It is all just chocolate box.
That may be so, but I rather like the odd box of chocolates. Just once in a while a chocolate box will make a better present than a set of spanners or a pair of socks. As a diet, emetic; but as a treat, delicious. But perhaps the air of Sidmouth has turned me sentimental. I hope so.
As Mad As Mad Can Be
One of the tasks that faces the writer is the search for the telling simile. It takes one back to the days of the rather ‘modern’ English master at school (by modern one meant his jacket was green needle-cord and sprinkled with scurf instead of a traditional Harris tweed speckled with chalk-dust), who delighted in drawing attention to the ‘freshness’ and ‘originality’ of Ted Hughes and his pike or Dylan Thomas and his slow, black, sloe-black fishing-boat bobbing sea.
One remembers with a blush one’s own desperate lunges at freshly struck epithets: ‘storm-clouds of gym-shoe black’ and ‘cheeks carved with hell-hot tears’ still cause me particular wrig-glings of shame, although both at the time won warm approval from young, unconventional Mr Kershaw and a brace of his best alpha double-pluses. It is fortunate that when we arrive at manhood the saving anchor of embarrassment bids us rather face those similes we know (black as night, bold as brass, mad as a hatter) than fly to others we know not of; to mint one’s own smacks of verbal dandyism.
Unfortunately, however, man has moved forward in blackness, boldness and madness since the days when our forefathers laid down the law on literary comparisons, and embarrassment must be risked in order adequately to convey the perplexing realities of modern life. Madness is an especial problem. The Blackadder solution is to strive for what one might call repetitive hyperbole: ‘as mad as Mad Jack McMad, winner of the all-Scotland Mr Mad Competition’.
Another approach in circumscribing madness is the Disorienting Nonsense Simile, invented by, I think, the comedian Ken Platt, who offered the world his immortal ‘daft as a brush’, which opens up many endearing possibilities: ‘as mad as a pair of trousers’, ‘as mad as a house’, or even perhaps ‘as mad as Ovaltine’. The most direct route to a new trope, of course, is to examine modern madness more closely and see what it suggests: ‘as mad as an actress’, ‘as mad as a ’phone-in caller’, ‘as mad as a train-spotter’, ‘madder than a man who decides to use the M4 on a Bank Holiday Monday’.
The madness of those who thought it would be a Good Idea to get rid of the old rear-platformed Routemaster buses and the red telephone kiosks needs, of course, special attention, as do the wilder shores of lunacy inhabited by the unfortunate who thought up the phrase ‘serving suggestion’.
But what verbal resources are there left to cover the real madness, the madness which in miniature goes like this: ‘I know if I just let go and pee in my trousers I’ll regret it. They’ll go cold and unpleasant and start to stink. Nonetheless I can’t be bothered to walk to the lavatory, so here goes.’ Followed by misery, discomfort and a fouled pair of trousers.
Who behaves like this? Well, on a larger scale it is the same madness that bids us say: ‘I know we’re destroying species of tuna, eliminating dolphins, whales, rhinos, elephants; destroying rain forests, poisoning the earth, air and sea, but heigh-ho.’ In this second scenario, of course, we’re fouling more than a pair of trousers.
Many of you will now be thinking: ‘Lumme! More fashionable Greenery, let’s turn to the Sports Section,’ but I don’t intend to rehearse the environmental argument here. After all, we know it already; that is the point.
How do we describe a madness so complete and universal in our species as not to be a madness at all, but a norm? ‘As mad as the maddest thing you can think of whipped up into an insane pottiness, psychotically marinated in maniacal unreason and folded into a bubbling bedlam of wild lunacy before being heated under an unbalanced flame of raving derangement. Drain, leave to stand, then section under the Mental Health Act.’
Not strong enough; it doesn’t cover even the external symptoms. ‘As mad as a human?’ Perhaps, but we should be more honest. We all know the way we are taking the world and the most we are doing, like myself, is talking about it. The new index of madness is personal. ‘As mad as me,’ should be the official entry in the Oxford Book of Similes.
Young, unconventional Mr Kershaw would have frowned at that one, it lacks concretion and poetic intensity, but he wouldn’t have been able to fault it for accuracy. I might have got away with a beta plus, brackets minus, question-mark, close brackets.
The Appearance of Reality
We are capable of seeing only what we want to see. This is a well- documented and widely understood truth. Those unsympathetic to the causes and aspirations of the Left in politics look into the face of a Dennis Skinner, say, or an Arthur Scargill and see ravening ambition and frothing insanity; those from the other side cannot understand how anyone can look at the aspect of a Tebbit or a Thatcher without reading the manifest signs of megalomaniac unreason and deluded pottiness written there. Prejudice or plain knowledge inform what are supposed to be our dispassionate and neutral senses. ‘You’ve only go
t to look at the eyes,’ people never tire of saying of Enoch Powell or Tony Benn. But there is, as King Duncan so wisely remarked, no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. Lady Mosley on Desert Island Discs last year found herself able to discourse freely on the blueness of Hitler’s peepers with the gasping admiration of a teeny-bopper and of course she was perfectly right: Hitler’s eyes were blue and strikingly so. We would like to think that they were blank and pitiless as the sun, savage, heartless and diabolical, but life is never as easy as that. If all wicked people looked wicked to a disinterested observer, things could be managed so much more easily. Can we honestly say Schweitzer looked any more saintly than Crippen? If we showed photographs of Mother Teresa and a Ravensbrück concentration camp guard to a person unfamiliar with the faces of either, would they be able to tell us which was which?
I was once interviewed for a respectable Sunday newspaper by a highly regarded journalist, if there is such a thing. I arrived at the restaurant designated for the meeting, checked in my crash helmet, or skid-lid as we wild leather-boy bikers like to call them, and joined her at the table. I was wearing a goat-skin flying jacket, jeans and a T-shirt. The interview when published opened with the words ‘Tweedy Stephen Fry …’ As far as she was concerned I was a walking bolt of hand-loomed Hebridean heather-mixture tweed and she was damned if the evidence of her eyes was going to contradict this view.
Sheridan Morley reviewed the first of the television performances of Wagner’s Ring Cycle earlier this week in Another Newspaper. He described the introduction in which Norman Rodway, as Bernard Shaw, delightfully performed an extract from ‘The Perfect Wagnerite’. Morley admired this opening enormously, but it was followed, he said, by the curtain rising, and a lot of fat women singing. After that, in his opinion, the whole thing went downhill. Now plenty of people seem to dislike the music and drama of Wagner; it’s a bally shame, but they do. Richard Ingrams reviewing a book in last Saturday’s Telegraph managed a sideswipe at the Meister’s musicianship which one could not have believed of a man who can write so sensibly about Bartok, but there you go, one man’s whatnot is another man’s thingummy. The strange thing about Sheridan Morley’s remark is that none of the women who appeared on stage for the ensuing performance of Das Rheingold could, by the remotest stretch of the imagination, be described as even slightly fat, large, rotund, corpulent, stout, of ample proportion, obese, tubby or over-generously endowed with adipose deposit. The Rhine Maidens were willowy; Fricka, Freia and Erda all splendidly proportioned. There are no other women in that work. But as far as Sheridan Morley was concerned female Wagnerian singers are huge and that is that, ocular evidence can take a powder.