Cake or Death

by Heather Mallick

  What kind of country spends £1 billion planning the privatization of the postal service, renames the Royal Mail “Consignia” and then gives up, realizing that the mail will go the way of water and railways? It will be a mess.

  I did try to look on the bright side of a country that increasingly frightened me. No one does squalor better than the Brits. You can go into a Little Chef off one of Britain’s endless pointless motorways, look at a menu so lurid it looks like you’re being handed stills from an operation on your filtration organs—spleen, liver, et cetera—and then you can eat something that is clearly not food. It is matter, greasy matter.

  And then you can drive to St. Ives, where the young Virginia took family holidays for about fourteen years until the death of her mother. She lived at Talland House, a beautiful home now surrounded by cheap, crappy, badly designed modern buildings and torn apart to make flats for people who’ve never heard of Woolf. Any other country would turn Talland House into a shrine. All I remember is a morbidly obese man wearing a stained wife-beater with skin burned the colour of a hothouse tomato standing in a giant parking lot outside the house. He had just bought the place. Everyone in St. Ives looked like him. For this is your British tourist. People complain about fat, loud Americans but the Brit peasant has them beat on sight alone.

  I was in a bad mood, having cut myself badly on the harsh toilet paper at the St. Ives public toilets—I know this sounds impossible but believe me, it is not—and I was limping and hoping no actual blood was flowing. We went down to the seashore where the sand was the colour of cream and the sea was the freshest, most beautiful warmed turquoise I had ever seen. Godrevy Lighthouse stood in the distance as it had in Virginia’s time. Stand on the shore and look out. England is very fine indeed. But behind me was a municipal festival of dog droppings and shops selling horrible candy and frying mystery meat at grotesque prices.

  I have never been so disappointed, so angry. Cornwall had a beautiful town with a distinguished history built on a hillside facing out to a seascape that would make Turner faint and they turned it into a dirty, raucous, crowded place with broken pavements and shambling hovels that smelled of deep-fat fryers and hairy armpits.

  There were poor people in Virginia’s time. Her mother, already nearing an early death, used to exhaust herself caring for the poor of St. Ives. But photographs don’t show this kind of public self-destruction. I think there were small pleasures then, even for the poor. There are no pleasures, large or small, in St. Ives now, beyond the ones Nature gave to the seashore.

  St. Ives is emblematic. For Britain was always a peasant country with a gap between rich and poor that rivalled what the Americans are creating today. The Second World War finished Britain off. The architects of the sixties did murder most foul with their great heaps of concrete, a material that stains in the rain in that rainy country, and then the postmodernists came along. Instead of repairing the remains of the beautiful architecture that once graced the place, they build glass gherkins. It’s not a country suited to glass or to fibreglass Georgian columns—the Turkey Twizzlers of architecture, says Alain de Botton. It’s suited to the vernacular stone, to brickwork, to symmetry.

  There are wonderful dreamers like Thomas Heather-wick building a plaza like a just-unrolled carpet of blue glass in the middle of Newcastle. It is made out of old bottles; Newcastle is an alcoholic’s paradise. But there are so few of these designers.

  The great thing about Britain has always been its eccentrics, which is not the right word. They are people who fizz with personality, who are interesting in themselves and don’t give a toss what other people think of them. Eddie Izzard, one of the greatest stand-up comics, started out by busking with comedy routines in Covent Garden. He was told he was crap, he said. Most people would slink away. His crapness was what sustained him, he said. And he wanted to be a heterosexual transvestite, so he did that.

  Britain even has great politicians. I don’t mean the Manny Shinwells, Tony Benns, Barbara Castles and the Gerald Kaufmans who honour our species, I mean the MPs with actual personalities, like the fuckable mess Boris Johnson and the constantly fucked Alan Clark, who wrote his great confessional (actually brayingly boastful) diaries, and George Galloway and the magnificent backbenchers who say fuck you to Blair and suffer for it with honour. But they’re so few in number.

  Five percent of the population is intelligent (in Britain that means fucking brilliant as in Great Fucking Brilliant Britain) and most of the population is funny. Brits are outrageous; they make me howl. The place is full of Izzards; it’s the only thing that makes the country worthwhile.

  The government is composed of lying bastards. It’s hard to pick the lowest point in British politics. But I took it to be the suicide of Dr. David Kelly, a distinguished decent man who told a BBC reporter that the government was lying about the “evidence” that would justify its invasion of Iraq. Kelly was publicly hanged, drawn and quartered by his employers. Within days, he quietly went for an evening walk and slit his wrists under a tree. He lay there through the night, eventually bleeding to death.

  The Hutton Report was engineered to exonerate the government of any wrongdoing in the matter. The prime minister’s wife, the peculiar Cherie Blair, and her husband’s brutal hatchetman Alastair Campbell, signed a copy of the report and auctioned it off several years later. They could not have been more cruel had they signed it in David Kelly’s blood.

  But the Blair years were full of moral monstrosities like that. One prominent Briton said he had gone off Blair (remember, Blair was elected as an honest Labour prime minister who would undo the economic brutality of the Thatcher years) when he read from the Bible at Princess Diana’s funeral. The reading was full of unnatural pauses, all wrongly placed and hideously staged. It’s painful to listen to, so phony it is. And this man realized that Blair was acting. It was only the badness of his acting that made it apparent. But everything was done for show, for spin. Truthfulness had vanished. It was laughable, no longer a virtue.

  And I began to hate Britain.

  It’s ironic that my hatred of Britain coincided with a noticeable slide in the quality of British literature. But I may be wrong. Perhaps it has always been this way. Only a fraction of what was published was any good. It used to be you’d find some nugget in almost anything. But generally publishers were putting profit over quality, just as politicians were putting spin over actual good results.

  Everything was turning to crap. It left a great gulf in my life, as I dropped one newspaper after another and essentially abandoned the reading of current fiction. There are always enough classics to occupy me, but when Michael Frayn, Doris Lessing and Margaret Drabble die … That generation is dying out, and there are few wonderful young writers to replace them. I no longer see the point of fiction at all if it is going to be done this badly, but it was only when the rot began in Britain that I realized this.

  Britain is so grotty. They don’t even do those quiet ingenious little murders now where the neighbours only find out when there’s a funny smell from the drains. It’s drive-by shootings and thugs torturing the other thugs on the housing estates because Blair won’t spend money on the poor and there’s no other way to pass the time. Unemployment is massive on the north side of the divide. Schools are whirlpools of failure. People get fatter and sadder and angrier every hour. There’s something so grotesque about it, like a glass menagerie or an animal farm, except they’re humans and no human deserves this.

  The only thing Brits can do is laugh and this is the only thing I still turn to them for. Laughter comes in print and television and discs of various sorts. They still live in a sea of words with Eddie Izzard putting them together better than most. Izzard’s black-rimmed eyeballs swing while his lipsticked mouth widens into an impossibly huge grin and he says the word “Az-er-bai-jan” and I could eat the syllables. He says his standup is just him standing up talking nonsense. People pay for British nonsense. They envy it and yearn for it.

  Yet it’s a
sad thing to roll about as I watch a once-great nation’s biggest export—its humour. Besides guns, tanks and fighter jets, I mean.

  What a loathsome country. What an awful place it is. I shan’t see it again in my lifetime.

  Falling in Love with France

  Or why France gets me hot

  Trust me to enshallow my love. But I fell in love with France because of the sunlight hitting the Seine in a certain way as I sat at a café drinking table wine. As usual, I qualified my love and this is why I am not what they call a “fun” person. Perhaps the sun is glinting off the corpses of the two hundred Algerians tied up and dumped in the Seine to drown in the riots of 1961, I thought. But I still fell in love.

  I had a very good therapist, who is still sort of on-call for me, and she believed in God. I can’t be doing with God, so she asked me to name what I would look to for guidance. And I said the feeling I have when I sit in a café in Paris. I am not myself, I say. I am seated. I do not stir. I ponder. My heart beats slowly. I don’t leap to my feet for some suddenly necessary task. I am simply there.

  We couldn’t ask “How Heather feels in a Paris café” for guidance, so she translated this feeling as “the goodness of life,” and that’s what we looked to for wisdom. It’s a good thing to pray to pleasure, correct?

  You shouldn’t have to fly across an ocean to have a moment of being. Ideally you’d have it in the bath, and it would also be cheaper and kinder to the earth’s atmosphere. Nevertheless in Paris I am the person I wish to be and the hell with faking it the other fifty weeks of the year.

  Adam Gopnik says that France does the great and the small, the grandiose and the minuscule. Think of the boulevards and the ancient buildings. Then think of the care with which the lady behind the counter in a shop wraps your inexpensive purchase. Small things matter too. No other country seems to manage this combination well.

  The Americans can embark on nothing huge without a consequent disaster that spells death for many. They can’t even build a levee properly any more, yet they once built the Hoover Dam. As for small things, all encounters with officialdom are tiny stupidity fests and their low culture is just a big load of ham, a salted crusty pink eraser from which you get scrapings.

  Big and small. It works. French history has its moments of great shame, although they seem to have fewer moments of great glory, or “gloire,” as the French say with great seriousness. There aren’t as many “fuck you” moments in French history as there should be. They were desperately awful colonists, although not as cruel as the Belgians, and they blew up the Rainbow Warrior, plus there’s a dreadful history of nuclear testing. They always call it “testing.” Nuclear power failed the test. No one mentions that, particularly the French.

  And their novels are laughable. But so are everyone’s. Where’s Zola when you need him?

  But when it comes to beauty, to food and sex and the pleasures of being alive, the French have written the history. Furthermore, when the history became shabby at the edges, brave people in the terroir movement declared they would maintain their farmland, their countryside, their food and their genius for blending rural life with wild life. I don’t know if they will win, but what a people.

  And when the government tells French workers to kiss ass, they learn to regret that decision they made to finally return cobblestones to the roads that had been paved since 1968. The French will lob their stones, the poor will torch cars; they will all make their feelings known with great certainty.

  The citizens of Canada and the United States, not so much.

  I understand that France is a strictly ordered and closed society. I understand that difficulty. But I could read any book there in public without being mocked for intellectual pretensions. I tell you, read your Walter Benjamin behind closed doors if you are in North America. As a matter of fact, the U.S. government will track your purchases on Amazon. Book purchasing would be dubious in the first place, and then I made the gaffe of sending books to Canadian Muslims jailed without trial or even charge after they may have done something or not. Amazon sent the books to the jail. Now our spy agency has banned all gifts of books. These jailed men may not read.

  Imagine being on a hunger strike without a book.

  That is why France is so intense for me. Good food, good bookstores, wonderful fashion with a strictness about it that means that expenditure doesn’t count for everything, wonderful smells and a precision about everything from the materials of storefronts to the colour of the cobblestones. You are surrounded by aesthetic statements. Yes, you leave central Paris and you see dubious aesthetic statements as well as poverty.

  But there is a central theme to which the French try to hew. Liberté, égalité, fraternité, even if they fail at it. In Canada, it is peace, order and good government, and we try although we fail.

  “Est-ce que je suis plus agée pour cette …?” I asked a salesgirl in Galeries Lafayette about a Versace knockoff with a corset tied with eight metres of flesh-pink ribbon. “Non, pas du tout,” she said, looking bewildered at the question. It’s not age, it’s the look.

  France is a personal country, an insertion, a core. I understand their language, and find little humour in their daily lives, certainly not the kind that enlivens Britain. But there’s something deep and powerful in the French that I admire. I wish I could live there. But then the illusion of glamour would be gone. There is no such thing as glamour. Let me repeat that. There is no such thing as glamour. Up close, it vanishes.

  I would not want my love of France to vanish. It’s an evanescent thing, even now. So two weeks a year will do me. Calvinism suits for the rest of the time, a contrast to that fullness and beauty, to that goodness of life.

  Fear Festival

  If you weren’t worried enough, wallow in this

  There are so many things we either fear or are expected to fear now. And this is such a commonplace, a staple for stand-up acts, that I would even hesitate to write about it were it not that no one has yet published the full list.

  Be vigilant, be very very vigilant. Watch out for grapefruit juice, which is exquisite on its own but boosts the intensity of some medications so much that it is like a lit match tossed in the gas tank of your stomach. Same for Tylenol No. 3. Same for SUVs, if you are a pedestrian, since you will be crushed under the wheels rather than thrown onto the windshield of a sedan and into the sky, dead either way, but still. Phthalates (the p is silent as in pthysis and ptarmigan, but you knew that) in plastic and nail polish are dangerous, as are pesticides and fertilizers (the latter causing cancer in small children). Microparticles in skin cream that in the course of smoothing and beautifying invade the skin’s natural defences and do untold damage inside the body. Flu vaccines in a tiny percentage of cases can leave you paralyzed for months. Flu vaccines that are still made with thimerosal, a mercury preservative included to make more money for the vaccine-maker—think big-box bulk vaccine injected into little Jimmy—may change your child’s brain, planting autism. Every bit of the perfect purple flower monkshood is poisonous as hell, but you may not be able to identify it in your garden. Don’t inhale carcinogenic fumes from your new flooring. E. coli is a danger, as are viruses like avian flu, West Nile, and human papilloma.

  There are illnesses that have no symptoms. Take chlamydia.

  JFK had chlamydia, which causes premature birth, stillbirth or fatal chlamydial pneumonia in infants. I doubt that Jackie would have had him tested before every sexual encounter, even if he had agreed to stop fucking “strange ass,” as he called it, every second day. Thus, we must wonder whether the stillbirth of Arabella and the premature birth and subsequent death of Patrick were caused by JFK. Good thing I warned you. Also, don’t injure your back in a sexual encounter and wear a neck brace if there is a chance that you will be assassinated. Make sure you can slide down with ease in your open-top limo.

  Watch that mole. Also watch for moles of the rodent kind for they will destroy your lawn and may carry diseases such as hantavirus. Wild m
ice do this too. Don’t let small children eat while travelling in the car, as each crumby, jam-laden, french-fry-baited seat will be a comfortable mouse bedroom.

  Imagine being well into your meal when you see one of humanity’s Most Hated enter the restaurant and be seated, thus presenting the huge moral dilemma of whether to throw a hot beverage into Henry Kissinger’s toad face and be ejected screaming insults, or worse, not to. Worse that that, you are dining alone and no one will ever know of your cowardice.

  You go into a washroom, which unknown to you is a hangout for anonymous gay trysts. You have difficulty urinating and your penile machinations are misunderstood by the undercover police officer coming out of a stall. Herbicides are bad.

  For reasons you can no longer quite remember, you vilify and slander a wealthy European banker, who fights back valiantly and clears his name, causing you to lose your job running a huge credit card corporation. But the experience wounds the banker so badly that when his bodyguard sets his boss’s apartment on fire to impress people with his talent for rescue, the banker is too paranoid about kidnappers to flee and thus burns to death. You knew you were an evil bastard but now you’re a murderer too. You become a recluse in your home. One night fire breaks out. Ha ha.

  You have your breasts reduced (or perhaps just the one; see below) but your removed and re-attached nipples don’t take. They rot and fall off. An air conditioner might fall out of a six-storey window onto your head. You get talked into a colonic irrigation, but you choose a new spa (if the spa realm can be said to get that internal) where they use too great a volume of water and something hidden but crucial ruptures. You die, in great pain, yes, but the embarrassment is worse. Other people just go to the toilet. What, that wasn’t an option? Because it’s an option for seven billion other people. Think of that as the bright light approaches you. Or is it you heading toward the bright light? Either way, you’re dead.