by Jan Morris
The world was certainly with me, but not in Wordsworth’s dire sense. On the contrary, such worldly blessings were available to me, thanks to a later technical revolution than his, as would have made his heart sing! Just think what happiness a tablet must offer to bed-ridden people, or the lonely, or the imprisoned, or even simply the bored stiff. It is, in my view, one of the truly welcome instruments of Progress – even of Happiness, even of Kindness itself, that ultimate abstraction!
DAY 51B
A Morning Limerick
Not feeling terribly bright,
I lost all compunction to write.
Without more inquiry
I shut up my diary
And read P. G. Wodehouse all night.
DAY 52
A greetings card arrived the other day picturing five cats all in a row, two black-and-white, three tabbies. They stare back at me now, and honorary cat that I like to think myself, I am fascinated by the different expressions in their eyes. The black-and-white ones, which seem to be animals of the fluffy, bedroom-slipper kind, appear properly conformist and look back at me without much interest, satisfied, kindly enough – not unlike, in fact, the artificial cats’ eyes that line our country streets as safety devices. In the eyes of the three tabbies, though, there is an expression at once melancholy and eager, with a touch of the wild perhaps.
My family and I have lived with generations of cats, from reckless Siamese on our houseboat on the Nile to sturdy extra-toed characters (like Ernest Hemingway’s in Key West). One among them all has looked back at me with an expression altogether different, the look of an equal. He was a Norwegian Forest cat, of a breed until recently unrecognized as a pedigree – no more than working farm cats. I named him Ibsen for his national origins, and went to Norway once especially to see his kind on the job. He was big and handsome and thoroughly decent, and until the day he died I considered him a friend and a colleague.
He was the last of our cats. We shall never have another, but I often think of him, and share a chuckle, when I pass a road sign, half hidden by foliage, which has for months ineffectually tried to warn us of a missing traffic aid ahead.
‘WARNING!’ it appears to proclaim. ‘NO CATS’.
DAY 53
‘I’ll Have a Damned Good Try’
It seems to me that catchphrases or odd quotations catch the essential character of a people better than national anthems. Just the single line ‘sea to shining sea’ perfectly articulates the native American sense of greatness, just as ‘(I’m a) Yankee Doodle Dandy’ is just right for its cockiness. Two words – Marchons! Marchons! – are all we really need of the ‘Marseillaise’, and who’s going to thrill to ‘Australia the beautiful’ when Matilda waltzes merrily by? ‘Danny Boy’ is Ireland, for me anyway, a snatch of ‘Lily Marlene’ is enough to transport me sentimentally to Berlin, and I know people who think the voice of a gondolier singing ‘O sole mio’ is the true voice of Italy herself.
As for England, two lines in particular seem to me truer to the nation than ‘God Save the Queen’. One is ‘It’s being so cheerful as keeps us going,’ a governing catchphrase of the Second World War. The other comes from 1916, when during the calamitous landings at Gallipoli Brigadier General Henry Napier approached in his boat the ghastly beach of Sedd el Bahr, already littered with the dead and wounded, and raked by Turkish machine guns.
‘Go back, sir,’ his soldiers shouted, ‘go back, you can’t land!’
‘I’ll have a damned good try!’ the general said, and perhaps that’s not bad for a national text. He was killed before he got ashore.
DAY 54
From the Innocent Long Ago
I pick up a newspaper, and tell myself yet again that Thomas Rowlandson has a lot to answer for. Yes, I know he died in 1827 (I’ve just looked it up) and that he was a considerable illustrator and portraitist in his day, besides being a great caricaturist. To my mind, though, he is responsible for the degradation of British political cartoons today. Not long ago they were often caustic, witty, beautifully drawn, instantly understandable and relevantly funny.
Today, it seems to me, the Rowlandson legacy has been tiresomely degraded. His technique combined meticulous draughtsmanship and design with what was then, I imagine, a marvellously shocking degree of coarseness. The balance was more satire than farce, but only just.
Alas, his disciples two centuries later are all too wedded to the cruder aspects of his genius, and today’s English political cartoons, even those commenting upon grand or terrible events of contemporary history, are all too likely to be ornamented with the grotesqueries, farts and bare bums that doubtless meant more in the innocent long ago.
That’s all. I can always throw it away, can’t I?
DAY 55
It’s cheating I know, but I can’t resist rescuing from oblivion, for no particular reason, a ditty I wrote years ago that still amuses me. It is called ‘Pig Rhyme’, and this is how it goes:
A mother pig crooned to her sweet little piglets three:
Come, wipe all the mud from your trotters,
and if you are good, we’ll see!
There may be a bucket of acorn swill for your tea!
Swill, said the piglets, acorn swill, oh wow!
Is that all you’ve got, you silly old sow?
The mother pig cried: But when I was wee
A bucket of swill was oh, such a treat for me!
On birthdays I had it, and when I was good as could be!
Big deal, said the piglets three.
(© Jan Morris, 1984)
DAY 56
It is wonderful, isn’t it, how insistently the experience of The First Time loiters in the memory! I don’t mean the grand initiations, of Love or Death or Revelation, but the mundane events of life that have never happened to you before. Some of these you may have forgotten entirely, but many more are there somewhere in your subconscious, slightly fictionalized down the years, perhaps. And here is an example of my own, plucked at last into a nonagenarian limelight!
When I was young, brash and short of cash I mocked the pretensions of haute cuisine and all that, and when my love and I went for a holiday in France we spent a week at a very modest pension in the hills of Haute-Savoie. The food was healthy, the wine was cheap, the ambience was very pleasant, the people were charming, and it cost us practically nothing. ‘You see?’ we said to each other. ‘Who needs more?’
On the way out of the mountains, though, at the end of our stay, I happened to notice a sign announcing the presence of a celebrated lakeside restaurant which food snobs had bragged to me about. We had to admit it looked inviting. ‘Oh well, hell,’ we said to ourselves, ‘just this once,’ and in we went.
We ate a single dish of little fish fresh out of the lake, with a bottle of Sancerre, crispy rolls and coffee to conclude. It cost us more than the entire bill for our week’s stay at the pension, food, beds and all.
It was my very first experience of a truly great French restaurant, and mon dieu, I have never looked back.
DAY 57
Most of us, I suppose, in these days of almost universal misery, must occasionally wonder what God is about – even agnostics like me who are not at all sure that there is a God. One Sunday, I heard on the radio an ingenious Christian apologist explain why his God of peace seems to be failing us abysmally.
It was like this, he said. The peace we prayed for was the wrong peace. When Jesus spoke of peace, he meant God’s peace, not ours – a different class of aspiration, it seems, apparently beyond human definition or understanding, but all embracing.
Well, thought I to my sceptical self, that sounds to me very like my own conception of the ideal. Utter, absolute absolution! Why bother with a God who apparently needs definition, demands repentance and expects worship – worship! – and capital letters to His Name? Even expects wars on his behalf?
Many decent Christians, indeed, do go into battle, if only figuratively, in one of their grand old hymns – ‘Onward, Christian Soldier
s’, for example, ‘marching as to war’, sung to a stirring rhythm at sacred gatherings with the very best of intentions …
Here is my own adaptation of it:
Onward, friends and neighbours, into the kindly sun,
Where we are paid-up members, each and every one.
We need no theologians, no doctrinal guff,
No military idioms, no sham repentance stuff –
We take the worthy with the nasty, the gentle with the rough.
The Absolute of Absolutes, Kindness is enough!
DAY 58
Don’t you find that some memories stay in the mind far more clearly than others – more meaningfully, more allegorically perhaps? One such memory for me concerns my very first flight in an aeroplane, which happened just about seventy years ago. Imagine!
It was an ancient de Havilland Dragon Rapide biplane, born in the 1930s, and I had hitched a ride in it from Cairo to Alexandria on a brilliant Egyptian summer’s day. I remember the celestial space of it all up there, experienced for the very first time. All was blue and white around me! I remember the desert sand meeting the azure Mediterranean far, far below, but what I remember most clearly of all was the moment when, high above the delta, suddenly both the engines cut out. All was silence, but for creaking and the swoosh of the wind, and it did occur to me that I might be about to die, dropping silently and ominously into Egypt out of that splendid lucidity!
But after a few minutes, the pilot turned around to me. ‘Just saving a bit of fuel,’ he shouted over his shoulder, before starting the engines again, and that moment has never left me. The irony of it, the shame (for I really was frightened), the touch of comedy and the beauty – a brief instant, that was all, set against so glorious and fateful a landscape in so absolute a silence. When I recall the moment, even now, I still feel some transcendental tremor, as if that pilot had himself been obeying the edict of some more senior captain, assessing me. I failed the test, I fear, because of that moment of cowardice, but perhaps I have made up for it by remembering the moment to this very day with such a rich mixture of emotions!
DAY 59
Some thoughts today about sentimentality. Yesterday evening, I went to my copy of Dr Johnson’s dictionary, fifth edition, 1788, bound in red leather, near mint condition, and as always when I pulled out Volume 2 I noticed once again the scuffed damage on its spine where, fifty years ago, my darling daughter, from her pram parked beside the bookcase, had picked away at its leather, throwing the bits on the floor and seriously reducing the value of the book (which had been given to me by my brother Gareth to celebrate the first ascent of Mount Everest).
Mingled reactions, then. I was wryly amused by the cost of that incident, elated as always by my love for Suki (who has long since had expensive babies of her own), proud and grateful for the memory of Gareth (died 2007), and warmed as always when I was reminded of Ed Hillary, Tenzing, the Western Cwm and all that … Add all those emotions up, though, examine them coolly, and I have to admit that I was being sentimental.
‘Well, why not?’ I hear you ask, and I agree with you. Not everyone will. Being sentimental, to many people nowadays, means being slushy or maudlin, and of course I see their point and know what they mean. My trouble is, though, that what they see as maudlin or slushy, I very often see simply as – well, full of sentiment. I admit that my experience with the dictionary extracted from me a slushy tear, and I am susceptible to melodies of facile emotion, like national anthems, love lyrics or novellas that sterner critics would despise. I would argue, though, that sentimentalism as such can only be good. Nobody calls you sentimental if you enjoy horror movies, however skilful they are, but they do if you admire Rupert Brooke; to shed a tear over a weepie movie is sentimental, to applaud a savage uppercut in a heavyweight contest certainly isn’t.
In short, to my mind sentimentalism is properly only an excess of feeling, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that; it is false sentimentalism, pretending to have feelings that you don’t really have, exaggerated emotions and trumped-up tears that should really be exorcised. As sense is to sensibility, so sentiment is to sentimentalism. Sterne meant what he said when he called his book A Sentimental Journey. So did Sinatra (by proxy, anyway) when he told us he was gonna make one. And so did I, when a tear came into my eye last night beside the bookcase downstairs.
By the way, I was consulting Dr Johnson’s volume M–Z to find his definition of the word ‘sentimentalism’, but he doesn’t even recognize it.
DAY 60
I am pleased to see on the Web that there are three sheep in Wales for every one human – not quite such a happy condition as New Zealand’s, where the ratio is apparently four to one, but still comforting in a way. I am not a great admirer of sheepness, or sheepity, but I like to think that throughout our green and pleasant land, paradise to industrial valleys, for every one of us scheming, selfish and conceited humans there are three creatures genuinely, as the hymnists say, meek and mild.
But then again, while lambs are perfectly lovely in their playfulness, prettiness and innocence, they grow up to be less than enchanting. Are any of God’s creatures more boring than your average adult sheep, permanently chewing the grass or the cud, apparently without a spark of ambition, night and day, night and day, for ever and ever feeding themselves and relieving themselves towards the end of life? Meek and mild, yes – once their parenting days are over they are apparently without responsibilities or ambitions, and there they are now outside my window, three of them to one of me, doing nothing at all but eat.
Still, they are much less harmful than we are, and when they were lambs they were perfect. We all were, humans and animals every one – even baby crocodiles are rather sweet. So I was comforted, just for once, by a statistic on the morning news – three of them to one of us.
Why should innocence be so transient? Heaven only knows.
DAY 61
Contemplating the melancholy truth that all living creatures look more attractive when they are young, it nevertheless strikes me as odd that human beings down the centuries have tried to look less old than they really are. Animals of many species, I know, disguise their true appearances, for safety’s sake or hunting advantage, but so far as I know they do not try to hide their ages (although absolutely anything is possible, I know, in the crazy domain of nature, where most creatures spend their entire lives simply not dying).
But humans, especially in recent times female humans, have expended time, ingenuity and creative gifts in trying to make themselves appear younger than they are – in short, generally speaking, more sexually attractive than they probably are. Look at all the ancient portrait figures – even mummies! – that have been prettied up with paintwork. Did it work? Was the ageing Cleopatra lovelier for her cosmetics? For that matter, are the sexual celebrities of our own time enhanced by their vastly expensive make-up?
I seriously doubt it, and I prophesy that before too long the chemical beauty enhancers of today, plastered on faces young (because they think it looks sexy) and old (because they think it makes them look young), will seem ridiculously dated. Already, it seems to me, many of the most truly beautiful women of our time wear little make-up, and the most gaudily touched-up young celebrities are beginning to seem not simply tasteless, but actually anachronistic.
So here’s a proposal for the powers that be: slap an enormous Vulgarity Tax on all cosmetics, while the going is good. The profits will be enormous, and can be devoted to good works, the promotion of comic art and compensation for the dispossessed owners of zoos, when they are finally, thank the Lord, made illegal.
DAY 62
A Rhyme for Christmas
I said to the Spirit of Christmas,
Christmas is not for me.
I’ve had too much of the pudding,
I’m tired of the Christmas tree.
I’ve noticed all that, he answered. I’ve watched you, and what do I see?
A soured old grouch with a soured old look,
&nb
sp; Perpetually reading some gloomy old book.
Take a grip on yourself – look at me!
I’m laughing and joking and dancing all day,
Cheerful whatever may come my way!
Never complaining, never a tear,
And especially today, this Great Day of the year!
Said I, if that’s an alternative course,
I’d rather keep grousing, peevish and cross,
And if things get still worse I can always, perforce,
Share a pint and good grumble with old Santa Claus.
DAY 63
If you are of a certain age, the most potently emotive volumes in your library are likely to be its old address books. All my life, not going in for anything as grandiose as bookplates, I have made a point of writing in my books when and where I bought each one, and these few thousand modest inscriptions (for example, in tiny fountain-pen ink, ‘Oxford, 1936’, or, in bolder felt-tip, ‘Jerusalem, 1947’) stir my feelings to some degree. They are impotent, though, beside the entries in my successive discarded address books.